Asif Kapadia: The film-maker who made docos truly incredible

British film-maker Asif Kapadia has released three astonishing feature-length documentaries.

The first, 2010’s Senna (now available to rent on iTunes, YouTube and GooglePlay), on the Brazilian motor racing legend, was one of the best assembled and calibrated films I saw in a decade. Senna was a rare documentary that received a general release on the big screen, outside of the usual film festival circuit.

I first saw it at Wellington’s unlamented Reading multiplex – and went back to watch it again a couple of more times over the next few weeks.

Senna was a film that made people who really didn’t care about Formula One racing, still care about the man.

In the same way that Leon Gast’s Muhammad Ali documentary When We Were Kings (not available online, but like the others mentioned here it can be rented via Aro Video and Alice’s) can make people who loathe boxing still love the man, Senna can make a motor racing fan out of anyone.

Kapadia followed up with Amy (available to watch on iTunes), which focused on the

incandescent and tragically short life of Amy Winehouse, who washed herself away on a tide of vodka at 27, but not before changing the DNA of what a pop song could be allowed to sound like.

Kapadia’s last – so far – feature length project was Diego Maradona (Neon, iTunes, YouTube and GooglePlay), on the Argentinian superstar of soccer – and especially on his tumultuous years playing for Barcelona and then Napoli.

Kapadia’s films are distinguished by using archival

sound and pictures to tell a story. It’s a technique that requires real research, delivers unexpected, unplanned results and is the hallmark of every real documentary-maker.

If you are writing a script for a narrator, when with more time and skill expended, the story could be allowed to tell itself, then you are not serving the subject of your film as well as you could. And now, Kapadia has his name and his reputation all over the series 1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything (available to stream on Apple TV +), which is about as good a series on music, recent history, politics and society as I have ever seen. If the only things that happened in music that year were the release of The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Mainstreet and Sly Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On, then 1971 would still be a watershed.

But add in Joni Mitchell’s Blue, Carole King’s Tapestry, David Bowie releasing The Man Who Sold The World and visiting America for the first time; plus, Soul Train hitting the American TV networks and the eruption of James Brown, Tina Turner, Bill Withers – and so many others – into the American consciousness, against a backdrop of the Manson verdicts, the Weather Underground bombing the US Capitol Building, the Sandford Experiment and the release of the ‘‘Pentagon Papers’’ – and you have a year that knocks 1968 and 1969, both well documented – into the cultural weeds.

Kapadia and his team dig deep into all of this across eight episodes. 1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything is an incredible, indelible, unruly and sprawling document of a year and an era that made us, culturally and musically at least, who we are today.