Nando Messias marches through East London. Photograph: Loredana Denicola
Last year, wearing a red dress and high heels, Nando Messias returned to the street in Whitechapel where he had been attacked 10 years previously.
He once again caught the attention of a group of young men, and they once again hurled homophobic and transphobic abuse at him. But this time he was not alone.
Clutching a bunch of balloons, and flanked by a marching band, he led a 70-strong audience to the site of the initial attack, and the premiere of his new show, The Sissy’s Progress.
Following his attack Messias wanted to know what it was about him that had attracted the negative attention of those young men on that particular night.
Drawing on his training as a classical ballet dancer he realised that without the accessories of make-up or jewellery, it was his walk that clearly marked him out as effeminate.
At first he attempted to iron the habit out, but it didn’t work.
“It felt like I was trying to impersonate a butch woman, not even a man – it just doesn’t fit my body”, he says.
Originally from Brazil, Messias instead began celebrating his uniqueness, leading to the creation of his carnival-esque new work.
Messias identifies as a “male-bodied, effeminate man” and says: “I want my ‘misalignment’ to remain intact.”
Acutely aware of gender norms from an early age, his mother refused to allow him to join a ballet class along with his elder sister. But being consigned to the sidelines only increased his desire to dance.
On turning 17 he paid for classes himself, choosing the female role rather than the male in a discipline with the gender binary at its very core.
“Ballet is very segregated. Girls go first then boys go second. I have always done female technique. I’m not interested in learning the codes of masculinity. I’m interested in enhancing my body, not correcting it.”
Messias came to London to study, going on to complete a PhD on the effeminate body in Western culture.
In Brazil he suffered verbal abuse on a daily basis but never the physical abuse he suffered in London. But it doesn’t taint his enthusiasm for the city. “It’s a very, very tolerant place,” he says. “It’s a place that welcomes difference and eccentricity.”
Messias says he was glad that the audience was able to experience the abuse he had suffered first hand during that first show.
“They saw what it’s like to be laughed at. This kind of thing still happens, and they saw that.”
The Sissy’s Progress is at Toynbee Studios, 28 Commercial Street, E1 6AB from 17–18 March. artsadmin.co.uk
Adlyn Ross and Haley McGee in Made Visible, a play about race and identity at the Yard Theatre. Photograph: Caleb Wissun-Bhide
In much younger, more pretentious days, I remember writing a short play as part of my A-Level coursework that was a conversation on a park bench.
Made Visible, which opens at the Yard this month, is by coincidence exactly that (although I’m sure similarities end there).
Based on a ‘real encounter’ Pearson had in Victoria Park with two women of Indian origin, it is a ‘meta play’ that aims to humorously explore issues of race and identity.
Playwright Deborah Pearson, 33, an East Londoner originally from Toronto, uses the conversation between the three women to take aim at white privilege, asking the white writer to take accountability for being white.
“At first it appears to be naturalistic, a conversation between three women of different ages and backgrounds, but it then starts to question itself and becomes more like a play about the attempt to make that play, or the ethics of making that play and whether or not one should,” she says.
Although one of the characters is a playwright called Deborah, Pearson says it is important to retain a degree of ambiguity over whether the character is actually her or not, or even whether the encounter actually happened.
“It’s clear it’s a composite of me,” she says, “but would it really be possible to really stage something that really happened anyway? There would always be something about the truth of that situation which is flawed by trying to funnel that experience through one person’s perspective.”
A former Royal Court young writer and co-director of experimental theatre outfit Forest Fringe, Pearson describes much of her work as ‘contemporary performance’, solo performances that are usually autobiographical, so writing a play for actors is a departure.
Her ambition is for the play to be part of a wider conversation about lack of diversity and a lack of representation in the theatre industry, an issue that has come to the fore in Hollywood recently with OscarsSoWhite.
“We’re all trying to see this play as an emperor’s new clothes moment of pointing out how come so many writers are white and what does it mean. Just because someone is white and in this dominant position it doesn’t make them objective.”
Pearson realises that making a play with a basis not far removed from academic discourse could be a challenge for audiences expecting an evening’s entertainment, and she has a solution – humour.
“The thing is whenever you want to talk about something that’s a sensitive topic politically, a good way of doing that is by being entertaining and funny,” Pearson says.
“I hope the play’s quite funny but I hope that the joke’s in the right place. There’s a great term about punching up rather than punching down so I really want the jokes if anything to point towards the discomfort these things bring about and then that these are things that need to be addressed.”
Made Visible 15 March–9 April The Yard Theatre, Queens Yard, White Post Lane, E9 5EN theyardtheatre.co.uk
A Serene Expectation of Light, on display at Rivington Place in Shoreditch, offers excerpts from two series of work by Brazilian photographer Mario Cravo Neto.
For over 30 years, before his death in 2009, Neto produced striking images that reflect the complex blend of cultures that give Brazil its unique identity.
The exhibition features the monochrome portraits of the Eternal Now series (produced in the 1980s and 90s) placed alongside Neto’s later colour snapshots of urban life in Salvador, Brazil’s first capital and a centre of immigration and diversity from the first European adventures into South America.
The Eternal Now series profiles aspects of the Candomblé religion that fascinated the artist. Candomblé emerges from the history of Salvador and Brazil, from the mixing of Yoruba, Bantu and Fon beliefs from West Africa with Roman Catholicism and indigenous South American beliefs.
Candomble’s worship of orixás, ancestral spirits imported by the transported peoples from modern Nigeria, Togo and Benin, still provides a rich spiritual and cultural basis for a system of belief and worship that Neto himself embraced during his life. His images here show posed worshippers, objects and animals for sacrifice and ritual moments fixed in black and white.
Neto’s images from this series reflect an almost obsessive focus on the minutiae of human bodies, fine wrinkles and liquid beaded on skin, texture and the interaction between objects and humans.
The studio set-up of these images appears informed by Neto’s earlier practice as an installation artist, the models carefully posed and the images framed for formal effect as much as the impact of their subjects. His images linger on the flick of a feather as a chicken is held, or the congruity of dappled patterning between a tortoise shell and the painted skin of a celebrant.
It is a shame that the installation in Rivington Place has not served these images particularly well, their black and white formality muddied by overly harsh lighting, and the resulting reflections from the heavy glass of the frames. The irritation of this unexpected problem spoils somewhat the first section of the exhibition. From a quick glance at the comments board, I can see that I was not the only visitor to find this frustrating.
Neto’s colour images though, which make up the second section of the exhibition, are well displayed in a double grid of bright squares. These images are still fleshy but more spontaneous, with traces of motion that are absent from the studio portraits of The Eternal Now series. In one of these vivid, less posed images a young woman floats partly submerged in a pool, her body made unfamiliar by the play of light on the water.
Neto’s colour is as stark as his black and white, whether the wet red of watermelon slices in the yellow sun or the deep blue pattern of the tiled street as boys play. Again, textures are the key visual element, an obsessive focus on the contours of surface and body, and the bleed between background and foreground that connotes a passing snapshot of daily life.
The interaction between the two series is well signposted, the exhibition feeling like a brief glimpse into a huge and impressive practice. It contains work by a fascinating artist, whose subjects and life were indivisibly linked.
A Serene Expectation of Light is at Rivington Place, EC2A 3BA until 2 April autograph-abp.co.uk
Image courtesy of the artist and the Approach Gallery. Photograph: FXP Photography
Judging speculatively from her work, the Belgian artist Cris Brodahl must be a sensitive sort. Brodahl makes monochrome photorealist, film-noirish paintings of sensuous and brooding female forms, influenced by surrealism.
But her new series at Approach Gallery marks a departure for the artist, in the introduction of sculptural form. The passive female beauty taken from 1930s and 40s film is contrasted and paralleled with an active exploration of modernist sculpture. In the painting Lightyears (2015), from which the exhibition takes its name, collaging becomes the physical crack of a door opening slowly where the subject slowly emerges. The canvas is sized and mounted onto an aluminium-cut angled back, offering a blade-like edge.
There is a sense of a yearning here, a yearning to manifest some sort of identity, whether fiction or fantasy. Brodahl slows down time in the way she pauses on details, producing a quiet space away from contemporary visual cacophony.
These are paintings in which mystery is taking place, the different sections of the image, precisely cut like blades of shattered glass, introducing an interruption to the passage through the canvas. Stripped of excess, taking a closer look rewards the viewer by revealing subtle nuances of colour within the monochrome paintings. The way Brodahl’s works are arranged within the gallery is particularly well-considered. Some pieces are hidden from sight, gradually creeping into view after some absorbed observation. This is done through thin partitions and a table-height shelf, and the diagonal slats added to the window in the gallery, evocative of crisp white paper.
Lightyears by Cris Brodahl is at The Approach gallery, 47 Approach Road, E2 9LY until 27 March theapproach.co.uk
Portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft by John Opie (c.1797). Wikimedia Commons
A statue of Mary Wollstonecraft on Newington Green could finally happen after two political heavy-weights threw their support behind the long-running campaign.
The Education Secretary and Minister for Women Nicky Morgan, as well as the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, have praised the efforts of the Mary on the Green campaign to commission a statue of Enlightenment thinker Wollstonecraft on Newington Green, next to the school where she once taught.
“It’s time we celebrated the women who have shaped our country,” Mr Corbyn said. “Let’s start with a statue of Mary Wollstonecraft – one of the great pioneers of women’s equality.”
Mr Corbyn described as “shocking” how the vast majority of statues and memorials in the UK depict men, adding: “It is time to redress the balance and honour the millions of women who have transformed Britain for the better.”
The Independent last weekend reported that the Department for Education may get involved with the campaign to commemorate Wollstonecraft, who in the late 18th century penned the philosophical treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
“Nicky Morgan’s people have expressed an interest. They’re looking over our numbers and we’re really excited about that support,” said Bee Rowlatt, chair of Mary on the Green.
Asked to comment by the East End Review, Ms Morgan said:
“We need to make sure girls grow up seeing influential women like this represented – in literature, through education and among the statues we have to celebrate the work and sacrifice of our most influential figures.
“I welcome any efforts to raise this important issue and ensure that women take their rightful place in our cultural history.”
As the spokesperson for Mary on the Green, whose supporters number the likes of Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty, and the broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, Ms Rowlatt said that it was important that Wollstonecraft be celebrated in the part of London that helped form her radical views.
“She lived in this radical community of extraordinary people like Richard Pryce and where she became a writer and the huge Enlightenment philosopher for which we value her today.
“People say, ‘Why a statue? Why not equal pay or FGM? But this is about visibility of women, and a headcount of London statues shows that nine out of 10 of them are of men.
“She’s an icon of social mobility and I think it’s really important that a woman of her stature, who came from nowhere and achieved so much but is yet to be recognised, is visible.”
At 15 and a half, having bunked off most of his final year at school, Mick Hugo ‘skinned out to sea’. In other words, he gave in to the nagging urge to ditch his native Hoxton, and joined the merchant navy. It was the early 1960s and he was leaving behind the unlikely prospect of a chance career in the film industry, in favour of ‘horizons’.
Half a century on from leaving the service, Hugo, now a builder by trade, has written 100 or so pages about his time working on the world’s oceans. His thoughts on various aspects of the seaman’s experience, which have remained roughly etched in his memory, represent a kind of challenge to conventional literature.
He writes in a raw, rugged style, untamed by any pretentious notions of a burgeoning literary life. As a result, Skinning Out To Sea is fresh and bracing, delivered in a manner befitting a boozy pub chat. Its sentences are often long and can feel unchecked, which, though occasionally jarring, contributes to a rambling style that’s lifted by Hugo’s clear knack for poetry.
Comprised of 20 short chapters and accompanied by a series of the author’s own evocative, if scruffy, sketches, the book covers myriad subjects. It details raucous exploits in far-flung ports, the day-to-day grind on deck, the social structure of the ships’ crews – which operate almost like allegorical micro-societies – and, of course, the wild exchange of pranks.
Portions of the text that stand out include recollections of when a troubled crew mate, Brummie, threw himself overboard into the black waves, and of a charismatic man-about-town, Lenny, who, it turned out, was in a relationship with a rather more unkempt male steward. The former description, which is accompanied by the original logbook account, offers stark insight into what was at stake for some at sea, while the latter is handled with a confident balance of humour and sensitivity.
Moreover, Hugo’s equating of the initial arrival of British sailors in blissful Tahiti centuries ago with taking acid for the first time is worthy of considerable praise.
While you might expect an abundance of tales of ill health and strife from a book of this sort, Skinning Out, for the most part, provides the opposite. Other than a period spent locked up in New Zealand – for reasons that remain unclear – Hugo’s personal experience comes across as largely positive and full of wonder. It was a chance to see the world, which for a working-class lad from the East End in those days was otherwise rare, and he relished it.
He describes the pleasure of jobs that entailed weeks at sea without respite: ‘If it were a longish passage, work would settle down to a relaxing pattern of day work, watch keeping and sobriety. No TV, no radio, no newspapers, regular meal times, sufficient sleep… and predominantly tropical weather with constantly changing astronomical night skies, no family responsibilities, no bills to pay… Aye, ‘twas hard!’
There is, however, a political undercurrent tracking the decline of the merchant fleet, touching on events like the seamen’s strike of 1966, which arrived in tandem with Hugo’s own political coming of age. This episode pretty much marked the end of his nautical career; but for a brief comeback with the highly desirable Australian merchant navy, he resigned himself to a life on land.
At home, Hugo would “slip back into the fold” and take his place “among the huddle on the corner”. He applied some of the skills he acquired as a seafarer to decorating for his money, but he always harboured creative ambitions, painting and sculpting away in his parents’ council flat. Now, at 70, he’s produced something special: Skinning Out To Sea is a modest triumph.
Mick Hugo will be in conversation with the writer Ken Worpole, and will also read from his book, on Thursday 10th March 2016 at 7pm.
The event will be held at Brick Lane Bookshop, and is free (including a glass of wine) but booking is essential – click here for more information and to book a place.
Skinning Out to Sea is published by Bowline Books. RRP: £10. ISBN: 9780993429507
Cleo Sylvestre as Mary Seacole. Photograph: Cleo Sylvestre
Walking into the Rosemary Branch Theatre, I feel instantly welcome. At 5pm the bar is bustling with customers young and old, with artistic director Cleo Sylvestre flashing a fuchsia-lipped smile as she greets each one.
“My friend Cecilia and I have been running the Rosie for 20 years now,” Sylvestre says. “My husband had just died, and Cecil was teaching ballet upstairs. It was really a baptism of fire, neither of us knew what we were doing.”
It seems Sylvestre’s life has been marked by a series of colourful career moves, having worked in music, film and on the West End. She points at a black and white photograph in a corner. It’s her with some “faces you might recognise” – The Rolling Stones, with whom she recorded ‘To Know Him Is To Love Him’ in 1969. “I had a great time.
The Stones were releasing music that no one had ever heard before, but I thought that rather than just going to loads of gigs, I wanted to be the gig”.
But despite her musical credentials, theatre is her first love, she says. “I love being able to go to the theatre and forget about the outside world for an hour. I think it’s all about being able to bring something to life.”
To mark the Rosie’s 20th anniversary, Sylvestre’s acclaimed one-woman show, The Marvellous Adventures of Mary Seacole is returning to the stage for a short run this month.
Based on the autobiography of the same name, it recounts Jamaican-born Seacole’s experiences of the Crimean War during which she set up a hospital using abandoned metal and driftwood to aid sick and wounded troops.
Whereas Florence Nightingale’s legacy has long been part of the school curriculum, Seacole’s contribution to British history has been largely overlooked.
Sylvestre admits she knew little about her until the 1980s. “I read her autobiography while my children were still very young and thought she was an amazing woman. Initially I wrote it for children. I wanted them to hear her story and get across that anything is possible if you put your mind to it.”
Sylvestre is also an ambassador for The Mary Seacole Statue Appeal, whose efforts have finally paid off, with a monument set to be unveiled this spring. It will be the first statue of a named black woman in Britain.
Portraying Seacole’s personality as well as her achievements was vital for Sylvestre. “I think she was quite a complex character; she was tough, she was intrepid. I think she had a very warm heart, but she had a lot of steel to have gone through what she did.
I also think – how can I phrase this without putting her down – that while she mixed with people from all walks of life, she didn’t suffer fools gladly. She could hold her own.”
The play promises to be an opportunity to hear the story of one remarkable woman, told by another.
The Marvellous Adventures of Mary Seacole is at Rosemary Branch Theatre, 2 Shepperton Road, N1 3DT from 9-11 March. www.rosemarybranch.co.uk
Florence and the Machine live in Hackney. Photograph: Dan Dennison
It’s been a long time since Florence Welch played a venue this small, the singer being more at home in leviathan arenas and on festival main stages than the relative compactness of St John at Hackney. The show comes as part of War Child UK’s Passport to the Brits, a series of concerts that has brought big names to small settings. Tickets were made available via donation and subsequent prize draw. A stirring introduction from War Child CEO Rob Williams expounds upon just what these donations can do for the most vulnerable victims of conflict.
Given the exuberance and theatricality that have become the calling cards of Florence and The Machine live shows, it is difficult to imagine how the band would approach playing in a fairly Spartan interior. However, The Machine has all but powered-down in favour of an acoustic line-up of piano, harp, trumpet and minimal percussion. Yet Welch’s vocals on the opening few numbers (‘Cosmic Love’, ‘St Jude’ and ‘Drumming Song’, all played sans drums) already threaten to rattle the stained-glass windowpanes. Following a galloping performance of ‘Queen of Peace’, Welch confesses she’s more nervous of small shows because she “used to be a lot drunker” when she originally played them. A voice in the crowd immediately offers to get her a shot.
A winsome cover of Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Silver Springs’ comes as a delightful surprise, and one that superfan Welch seems to be enjoying even more than the crowd. Equally surprising is a rendition of Calvin Harris collaboration ‘Sweet Nothing’, pushed a world away from the kitschy pop-house of the original and made into some real Nicks-worthy balladry.
Welch opts to go out on a high, with ‘Shake It Out’ and ‘Dog Days Are Over’ rousing the rabble into a swarming mass of rapturous singalongs and rhythmic clapping. It is one thing for a musician to sell-out a 20,000-capacity arena, but quite another to make the jump back to snugger surroundings without sacrificing the galvanising energy of the large-scale extravaganza.Even the most recalcitrant detractors of Welch’s music would find it a challenge to call this performance anything but impressive.
Florence and the Machine played at St John at Hackney Church on 26 February.
Look for birds in East London and you might spot pigeons and call it quits. But look properly, really notice what’s around you, and it’s thrilling what you can see: kingfishers, woodpeckers, peregrines, owls – and that’s before you even get to the particularly rare stuff.
London is a migration route filled with tributaries flowing into Mother Thames. There are valleys and heaths and ancient woodland. Seen from the sky our city is remarkably green. Conceiving of it like a bird might, and swotting up on plumage, has opened my eyes to new ways of experiencing these metropolitan environs.
Birds were a childhood love but I stopped noticing them as I got older owing to preoccupations with trivial things and the perceived uncoolness of ‘twitching’. Now the obsession has gripped me anew and I’m filled with childlike wonder at the richness of it all. What’s more, I’ve discovered I am far from alone.
Birdwatchers, birders, twitchers, ornithologists, avian enthusiasts – call us what you like – are viewed as eccentric bores by those ignorant of such joys. Trudging around with binoculars or a telescope and ticking off species on a list is not everyone’s idea of fun, but casual enjoyment of the natural world has huge, unappreciated benefits for mind, body and spirit.
As with all things, there are different subspecies of birdwatcher, but you don’t need to consider yourself one at all to appreciate that the sight of a hawk or the song of a whistling warbler can make memorable what would otherwise be another tedious commute or humdrum office lunch break.
“I did the London commute for quite a while,” recalls Howard Vaughan of the East London Birders Forum. “On my lunch breaks I wandered the streets and went into tiny little green spaces and found urban nesting sparrowhawks, a nuthatch, firecrests.”
A committed birdwatcher since the age of five, he now works at Rainham Marshes on London’s easternmost fringe. It’s a miraculous place where lapwing flocks float above reedbeds and acrobatic falcons hunt dragonflies in summertime.
Seals and porpoises pop up in the Thames, which flows past the reserve, and there are snakes, stoats and other creatures here too. Skyscrapers are visible in the distance and you can hear the groan of traffic from a nearby arterial road, but it’s hard to believe this is still London.
Perching: a Kingfisher in Rainham Marshes. Photograph: George Hull
“I’m from Ilford,” says Vaughan. “My mum is a Plaistow, East Ham lady, so I have the East End in my blood. When I first started birding in East London 30-odd years ago, Rainham Marshes [then a military firing range] wasn’t really an option. I used to go to the urban and suburban parks.
“I’d go birding in Wanstead Park and Wanstead Flats, up and down the Lea Valley. There are birds everywhere – that’s the bottom line.”
Gary Budden, a writer and editor at East London publishers Influx Press, also caught the bug young from his father, a working class, self-taught amateur ornithologist. Like many birdwatchers, the pair went on trips to obscure parts of the UK in pursuit of glimpses of sought-after species.
“We went all around the country doing birdwatchery stuff,” he says. “That probably instilled in me all the knowledge and gave me the passion for it. Then, when I got into my late twenties, it all just came flooding back.”
Now 33, he agrees that birdwatching tends to appeal either to children or to retired men, acknowledging: “It has had an image problem – it still has one to an extent.”
Budden’s own writing has been heavily influenced by The Peregrine, a niche work of literature by J.A. Baker, an Essex writer who was perhaps the ultimate obsessive birdwatcher.
He says there has been a renewed interest in writing about nature and the British landscape and that public appetite for the “authentic experience” that birdwatching offers is growing.
“I think people are bored, in a strange way,” Budden says. “When you go out looking for birds, you get something that counts as an authentic experience – an experience you can’t buy.
“You have to go to specific places to see specific types of birds. You can’t get that in any way other than by physically going to that place and engaging with it and knowing what you’re looking for. I think that’s part of the appeal.
“This is something that is completely outside of the human world, and it has site-specific aspects to it.”
In an age when our eyes are increasingly focused downward at the tiny glaring screens of our devices, in a country that has lost most of its large wildlife, birds remain dramatic symbols of freedom, beauty and purity.
“There is this statistic that British birds are the most watched in the world,” says Budden. “That is a curious but also rather unsurprising fact.”
Flying widgen
Is birdwatching undergoing a renaissance locally? There are signs it might be. Witness the plethora of blogs and Twitter accounts authored by youngish Hackney and Walthamstow types rhapsodising about the avian fauna of adjacent marshlands. People like Graham Howie, 37, a primary school teacher from Dalston who “started noticing” birds three years ago.
“I was training for the Edinburgh Marathon in 2012 and I used to use the Lea Valley,” he says. “I’d run alongside the canal. I used to run up and down there and see all these birds that I’d seen before but had not taken much notice of – birds like kestrels and cormorants – and I started to stop and have a look at them. The next week I took a camera and took pictures, and when I got back home I identified them. I kept doing that for a while. I saw more birds and I got heavily into it.
“Then I got to know the local birdwatching community. I met other people who were as odd as I was and got to know them and learned from them. They showed me other places I might not have known about otherwise.”
With revamped bird reserves now being created in Stoke Newington and on the edge of Walthamstow, how long before this pursuit starts being marketed as hip, perhaps with the assistance of that newly fashionable retro font that adorns so many pricy cafes?
I’m not sure I want it to be, but it would be no bad thing if birds were to become, for everyone, more than what J.A. Baker called “a tremor on the edge of vision”.
Hackney director Asif Kapadia triumphed last night at the Oscars, winning Best Documentary Feature for his film about the late singer Amy Winehouse.
Amy, which is the highest grossing British documentary of all time, beat off competition from Cartel Land, The Look of Silence, What Happened Miss Simone and Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom.
The film looks at the life of the troubled jazz singer, who died in 2011 aged 27, using interviews with friends and family as well as archival footage.
In his acceptance speech at Hollywood’s Dolby Theatre, Kapadia, 44, who grew up in Hackney, said: “This film’s all about Amy showing who she really was – funny, intelligent, witty. We just wanted to make a film to show what she really was.”
The Oscar win makes it a clean sweep of major award ceremonies for the film, which was named Best Documentary Award at the BAFTAs and Best Music Film at the Grammys.
The director responded on Twitter to this latest victory with one word – “Wow.”
Speaking to the East End Review in January, Kapadia said that his aim for the film was to show people “the real girl, the real Amy”.
“At least now people have more compassion and love for her now than maybe before. I think she became a bit of a tabloid persona, tabloid character, when actually she’s high art, she’s a real natural phenomenon and someone for London to be really proud of,” he said.
Kapadia has become the UK’s most successful documentary maker of recent times, with Amy surpassing Kapadia’s 2010 docuemntary Senna as the highest grossing British documentary of all time.
Talking about his upbringing in Hackney, Kapadia said it had given him “strength to survive”.
“I’m a Hackney boy born and bred,” he said. “I was born in Mother’s Hopsital which is no longer there, I went to Tyssen Primary school and I went to Homerton House secondary school.
“We lived in Stokey and we lived in Stamford Hill and although I don’t live in Hackney right now you can’t take Hackney out of the man. It definitely gave me the strength to survive.”
Last month Kapadia revealed that he is working on a new documentary about the Argentine football legend Maradona.
