East End Review

Tag: Senna

  • ‘Hackney boy’ Asif Kapadia nominated for Oscar for Amy Winehouse documentary

    ‘Hackney boy’ Asif Kapadia nominated for Oscar for Amy Winehouse documentary

    Amy Winehouse. Photograph: Alex Lake
    Amy Winehouse. Photograph: Alex Lake

    Hackney-born film director Asif Kapadia has been nominated for an Oscar for his documentary about the life and career of Amy Winehouse.

    Amy was nominated in the Best Documentary Feature category, and will go up against What Happened Miss Simone? as well as non-music related documentaries The Look of Silence, Cartel Land and Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom.

    Amy is the highest grossing British documentary of all time, surpassing Senna, Kapadia’s 2010 documentary about the Brazilian Formula One driver.

    Speaking to the Hackney Citizen and East End Review, Kapadia said he was sorting out his tax receipts when the announcement was made yesterday.

    “It’s been winning quite a few prizes, but I’m very superstitious and you don’t want to get carried away so I was trying not to think about it. Luckily our film starts with the letter ‘A’ so it was the first one up.”

    Despite critical acclaim and box office success, Senna was overlooked on the Oscar shortlist for 2012, making the nomination for Amy all the sweeter.

    “Our aim was to show people the real girl, the real Amy – and in that way I think we succeeded,” said Kapadia.

    “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.

    “Hopefully if this happens again and someone else has what appears to be a public breakdown we’ll show a bit more love and compassion and not attack them.”

    After wins last year for Rebecca Lenkiewicz (Ida) and James Lucas (The Phone Call), Kapadia is happy to be flying the flag for Hackney at this year’s Oscar ceremony, as fellow East Londoner Idris Elba lost out for his role in Beasts of no Nation.

    “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.”

    Asif-Kapadia receiving an honorary doctorate at the University of East London in 2011
    Asif-Kapadia receiving an honorary doctorate at the University of East London in 2012

    The Oscars have once again come under fire for a lack of racial diversity, with Kapadia enjoying the dubious distinction of being one the few non-white nominees.

    “I guess all you can do is be there and represent your side and hopefully other people will get the opportunity and come through,” he said.

    “I’m just happy to be there as one of the Londoners. I’m just going to go there with our film and not worry too much about that other stuff.”

    The 2016 Oscar winners will be announced on 28 February at a ceremony at the Dolby Theatre, Hollywood.

  • Asif Kapadia – ‘Something happened with Amy’

    Amy Winehouse. Photograph: Alex Lake
    Amy Winehouse. Photograph: Alex Lake

    Camden, not Hackney, is the place with which the singer Amy Winehouse, who died in 2011 of alcohol poisoning, will always be associated.

    But for Hackney-born director Asif Kapadia, whose acclaimed documentary Amy tells the story of the singer’s precarious life and untimely death, Winehouse could have been “a girl from down the road”.

    Unlike other films directed by Kapadia, such as the award-winning documentary Senna, Amy is a London film. And like many fellow Londoners, Kapadia was moved by the singer’s life.

    “Something happened with Amy Winehouse,” says Kapadia, explaining why he decided to make the film. “I wanted to know how that happened in front of our eyes. How can someone die like that in this day and age?

    “For me, she was like a girl from down the road. I grew up in the same part of the world. She could have been someone I knew, someone I was friends with or might have gone to school with. I thought we should investigate.”

    Kapadia was born in 1972, the youngest of five children. He went to Homerton House school (now the site of City Academy) and began his film career as a runner on student films.

    After undertaking an HND at Newport Film School, Kapadia studied film-making at the University of Westminster before completing a Masters in film and TV direction at the Royal College of Art.

    Amy has already broken box office records, and looks set to challenge Senna, Kapadia’s documentary about Brazilian racing driver Ayrton Senna, as the highest grossing British documentary of all time.

    Like Amy Winehouse, Ayrton Senna was an icon who died in tragic circumstances. But researching the story and carrying out interviews for Senna proved a more straightforward process.

    “With Senna there were a lot of books and a lot of people knew the story. With Amy it became apparent that no one knew the story, or that people were not willing to tell it.”

    Many of Winehouse’s closest friends apparently took a ‘vow of silence’ after her funeral, so to complete the 100 plus interviews that make up the film’s narrative, the production team needed to win over their trust, a process that took almost a year.

    “It was all quite recent and painful for a lot of people and there was a lot of guilt and a lot of baggage,” adds producer James Gay-Rees.

    “The whole experience took an awful lot out of all these people, understandably.

    It is hard to imagine what it must be like to see your closest childhood or teenage friend going through the perils of celebrity and mega-fame, knowing that there were underlying issues that would come to the fore.”

    Kapadia made the songs and lyrics of Amy Winehouse central to the film. “Once you understand her life and you read the lyrics, they run much deeper than you might have thought,” he says.

    “I thought all we have to do is unravel what these lyrics are about. That for me became the big revelation. This is a film about Amy and her writing.”

    Amy is on general release in cinemas now.