Asif Kapadia
Kapadia in 2024
Born	1972 (age 52–53) London Borough of Hackney,England
Occupation	Filmmaker
Years active	1997–present
Notable work	The Sheep Thief (1997) The Warrior (2001) Senna (2010) Amy (2015) Diego Maradona (2019) 2073 (2024)
Spouse	Victoria Harwood (m. 2006)
Website	asifkapadia.com

Asif Kapadia (born 1972) is a British filmmaker. Kapadia is best known for his trilogy of narratively driven, archive-constructed documentariesSenna,Amy andDiego Maradona.

Kapadia was born in 1972 in north London, to anIndian Muslim family.^[1][2] He attendedNewport Film School (formerly part of theUniversity of Wales, Newport, now theUniversity of South Wales),^[3]achieved a first-class degree (BA Hons) in Film, TV and Photographic Arts from theUniversity of Westminster^[4]and an MA (RCA) in Directing for Film and TV at theRoyal College of Art.

Kapadia has said he sees himself as a Londoner ("a Hackney lad"), northern European, with Indian family heritage. These unique characteristics helped to make him stand out as a film-maker when he was starting out.^[5][6]

“I’ve always tried to do things differently – because my point of view is different.

“I don’t come from private school, I don’t come from money. My family were not in the film industry. I’m not white, I’m brown, and my background is Muslim. My family are from India and are quite religious.

“As the youngest of five kids, my parents kind of let me do what I wanted to do. I was able to have a point of view, I wasn’t told, ‘You must do this’: I picked what I wanted to study, I never did A-levels. When I was at university, I would always argue with the tutors, because I would kind of have to do what they told me to do.

“Things like that were just me going, ‘I don’t feel that’s right, I’m gonna do this’. So I’m quite stubborn, I guess.”

Kapadia's first feature film,The Warrior,^[8] was shot in theHimalayas and the deserts ofRajasthan. The film caught the attention of The Arts Foundation who in 2001 awarded him a fellowship in Film Directing.Peter Bradshaw inThe Guardian describedThe Warrior as possessing "mighty breadth" and "shimmering beauty";^[9] the film was nominated for threeBAFTA awards, winning two: theAlexander Korda Award for the outstanding British Film of the Year 2003 and TheCarl Foreman Award for Special Achievement by a Director, Screenwriter or Producer in their First Feature.

Far North premiered at theVenice Film Festival, based on a dark short story bySara Maitland. Kapadia used the brutalarctic landscape to show how desperation and loneliness drives a woman to harm the person she loves.

Kapadia's fourth feature,Senna, was the life story ofBrazilian motor-racingchampion,Ayrton Senna. The film won theBAFTA Award for Best Documentary, the BAFTA Award for Best Editing and theWorld CinemaAudience Award Documentary at theSundance Film Festival 2011. Senna was nominated for Outstanding British Film of the Year.

Kapadia's next filmAmy was a documentary that depicted the life and death of British singer-songwriterAmy Winehouse.Amy was released on 3 July 2015 in theUnited Kingdom,New York andLos Angeles, and worldwide on 10 July. The film has been described as "heartbreaking", "awe-inspiring", "unmissable", "the best documentary of the year" and "a tragic masterpiece". The film received five out of five star ratings when it was reviewed at the2015 Cannes Film Festival in May. The film has become the highest grossing British documentary, and second highest grossing documentary of all time in the United Kingdom, overtaking Kapadia's 2010 movieSenna.^[10][11]

In 2018, a documentary film titledMaradona, based on Argentine football legendDiego Maradona, was released. Following on fromSenna andAmy, Kapadia states: "Maradona is the third part of a trilogy about child geniuses and fame."^[12] He added: "I was fascinated by his journey, wherever he went there were moments of incredible brilliance and drama. He was a leader, taking his teams to the very top, but also many lows in his career. He was always the little guy fighting against the system... and he was willing to do anything, to use all of his cunning and intelligence to win."^[13]

In 2019, Kapadia was awarded as Honorary Associate ofLondon Film School.^[14]

In May 2021, he released the musical docuseries1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything, based on the book1971 – Never a Dull Moment: Rock's Golden Year, by the British music journalistDavid Hepworth.^[15]

In 2024, Kapadia’s2073 was released. The film is ascience fictiondocudrama set in a dystopian future, exploring the subjects of climate change, corporate fascism, and the global erosion of democracy through the rise of fascism, fictionally depicting a future where these forces are allowed to continue unchecked.^[16] Through the creation of the film, Kapadia drew parallels to theTrump administration, stating the following: "Trump has been explicit about getting revenge on people. And now you have some of the richest and most powerful people in the world who became so through the collection of data. They’re now in power with someone who said, ‘I’m going to be a dictator’. It’s like Covid. When it happened in certain parts of the world, people kept thinking, we’re immune to it. It’s never going to happen. And it came and it rolled its way around the whole globe."^[17]

Kapadia is a signatory of theFilm Workers for Palestine boycott pledge that was published in September 2025.^[18]

Kapadia met and worked with Victoria Harwood on his 1997 film,The Sheep Thief. The pair would marry in 2006.^[19]

In the early 2000s, Kapadia was subjected toxenophobic practices after a taxi driver reported him to government officials for taking photos of New York City during a trip. As a result, Kapadia was placed on a US government watch list that required him to undergo extra screening while travelling. In response to the incident,Universal Studios provided Kapadia with a letter verifying his occupation, intended for presentation to government authorities. Ultimately, Kapadia avoided unnecessary travel to the United States for several years. Kapadia described his experience: "I would get stopped and interviewed two times before I got on a plane, pulled out in a room. I started realising that every time I show my boarding pass, instead of a green light going off, a red light goes off, and then you have to be taken somewhere for an interview…^[20] Everyone else in the crew would go through and I’d get pulled up. I had to get a letter from the head of Universal to say: ‘Asif is working on this project for us."^[17]

In 2015, Kapadia signed an open letter in solidarity with the people of Palestine, pledging to boycott professional invitations to Israel and to refuse funding from any institutions linked to its government. In the letter, the boycott drew comparisons to theArtists United Against Apartheid movement, a 1985 collective of artists who protested South African apartheid.^[21][22]

In December 2019, along with 42 other leading cultural figures, Kapadia signed a letter endorsing theLabour Party underJeremy Corbyn's leadership in the2019 general election. The letter stated that "Labour's election manifesto under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership offers a transformative plan that prioritises the needs of people and the planet over private profit and the vested interests of a few."^[23][24]

In October 2024, Kapadia shared posts on the social media platformX supporting the Palestinian and Lebanese peoples in reference to theGaza War.The Grierson Trust deemed some of the posts to be antisemitic, and subsequently removed Kapadia as a patron. Kapadia issued an apology, telling BBC News he was "mortified by the hurt and offence" that some of his posts have caused. Kapadia would go on to state that he is "equally passionate about all anti-racism".^[25] The Grierson Trust’s treatment of Kapadia led senior Muslim officials in the British television industry to boycott the 2024 Grierson Awards.^[26]

In September 2025, Kapadia signed an open pledge with Film Workers for Palestine pledging not to work with Israeli film institutions "that are implicated ingenocide and apartheid against the Palestinian people."^[27]

In 2022, Kapadia participated in theSight & Sound film polls of that year. It is held every ten years to select the greatest films of all time, by asking contemporary directors to select ten films of their choice.^[28]

Kapadia's selections were:

In September 2019, Kapadia appeared on BBC Radio 4'sThe Film Programme in which he told presenterFrancine Stock of his love for the Vietnamese gangster movieCyclo by writer-directorTrần Anh Hùng. He saw it when it first came out in 1996, when he was a film student, and it crystallised his ambitions for the type of film-making he wished to pursue. As he explained to Stock, "a lightbulb went off in my head" and his life was never the same again.^[6]

• Official website
• Asif Kapadia atIMDb

• 1972 births
• Living people
• English film directors
• English people of Indian descent
• British Ismailis
• Grammy Award winners
• Alumni of the University of Wales, Newport
• Directors of Best Documentary Feature Academy Award winners
• Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer BAFTA Award winners
• Collage filmmakers
• English people of Gujarati descent
• Khoja Ismailis
• Directors of Best Documentary European Film Award winners

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