Diego Maradona is brilliant and yet self-destructive, says director Asif Kapadia

Diego Maradona marks the third instalment in a trilogy of innovative, hard-hitting feature documentaries from the Academy Award-winning team behind SENNA and AMY – Asif Kapadia. Maradona is a household name, lauded as one of the greatest footballers ever to grace the game, a man who has smashed transfer records, dragging an under-achieving Italian football club, Napoli, to title-winning glory and claiming the 1986 World Cup for his native Argentina almost single-handedly. PVR Pictures brings to India the journey of the footballer on 11th October 2019.

Diego Maradona is an icon, a Latin hero, and a man of whom so many of his countrymen and women are fiercely proud. He took on European giants, toppling the might of Juventus, AC Milan and Internazionale with his sporting excellence. In Naples he became something approaching a demigod. “And yet still he doesn’t ever quite fit in,” says Asif Kapadia. “He carries anger and all his problems and issues come, I think, with being unprepared for fame.”

“He is brilliant and yet self-destructive,” the director continues. “And what’s really interesting is that when you look at him at the height of his achievements and when things start to go badly wrong for him, it’s when he denies his son.”

A major difference between the subject of his latest film and the two earlier feature documentaries is that while both Ayrton Senna and Amy Winehouse died at the peak of their careers, Maradona is still alive, albeit living out something of a public decline.