Diego Maradona

Diego Maradona completes the loose trilogy Asif Kapadia began with Senna (2010) and continued with the Oscar-winning Amy (2015): portraits of prodigies assembled entirely from archive, with interviews heard but never seen. It premiered out of competition at Cannes in May 2019, opened Sheffield Doc/Fest, and went on to BAFTA and British Independent Film Award nominations.

Kapadia and his regular editor Chris King worked from more than 500 hours of material, much of it never broadcast and much of it shot by cameras that followed Maradona through his time in Italy. The film concentrates on Naples: a working-class southern club, mocked by the wealthy north, buys the most gifted footballer in the world, and the city takes him to its heart. Kapadia separates Diego, the shy boy from Villa Fiorito, from Maradona, the persona built to survive the pressure, and lets the footage argue between the two. Antonio Pinto's score, familiar from the earlier films, gives the collage its pulse.

Reviewers found it the most formally assured of the three films, and the narrow focus on Naples gives a sprawling life a shape it might otherwise lack. It is as much about a city as about a man: what Naples asked of its idol, and what the rest of Italy thought of them both. Anyone sceptical of football documentaries should start here.