Diego Maradona

A living legend, a footballing genius, a fallen idol... Diego Maradona had already inspired a film by Emir Kusturica (Maradona) in 2008, but Asif Kapadia, author of remarkable documentaries on the broken trajectories of Ayrton Senna (Senna, 2011) and Amy Winehouse (Amy, 2015, Oscar for Best Documentary), focuses here on the Argentine player’s years in Naples. This intense period began in 1984 when, to everyone’s surprise, el Pibe de Oro (The Golden Boy") joined the little-known Italian club. Although he led his new team to the top, Maradona struggled with many demons (drug addiction, involvement with the mafia, refusal to acknowledge a child born from an extramarital affair). With access to 500 hours of previously unseen archive footage, Kapadia sublimates this epic tale, which is as glorious in sporting terms as it is deeply trying on a personal level. After an energetic opening sequence, whose synthesiser music is reminiscent of the introduction to Brian De Palma’s Scarface, the filmmaker brilliantly manipulates conflicting emotions, transforming a turbulent personal adventure into a heart-rending universal tragedy." (Damien Leblanc; troiscouleurs.fr)