World Awaits Legend Maradona's Red Carpet Cannes Walk
14th May 2019
It is only one of a wave of new works about the flawed Argentine football genius that include a just-wrapped Amazon biopic series that follows every step of his dramatic rise and fall
- Diego Maradona is sure to cause a stir when he turns up next week at the Cannes film festival for a new documentary about his jaw-dropping life by the Oscar-winning maker of "Amy"
- The poster for Asif Kapadia's striking documentary "Diego Maradona" also pulls no punches, calling him both hero and a "hustler"
- Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, Bono and Iggy Pop will climb the same carpet during the festival, which starts Tuesday, but few if any of them can draw the crowds or the passion as the short man born in a Buenos Aires shantytown
PARIS, France- Diego
Maradona is sure to cause a stir when he turns up next week at the Cannes film
festival for a new documentary about his jaw-dropping life by the Oscar-winning
maker of "Amy".
It is only one of a wave of new works about the flawed
Argentine football genius that include a just-wrapped Amazon biopic series that
follows every step of his dramatic rise and fall.
The poster for Asif Kapadia's striking documentary
"Diego Maradona" also pulls no punches, calling him both hero and a
"hustler".
Yet Maradona will still walk the Cannes red carpet for the
man who won plaudits and prizes for his insight into the life and tragic death
of singer Amy Winehouse.
Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, Bono and Iggy Pop will climb
the same carpet during the festival, which starts Tuesday, but few if any of
them can draw the crowds or the passion as the short man born in a Buenos Aires
shantytown.
It is this complex yet unshakable adoration, forged in
Maradona's frequent flirtations with death, that drew Kapadia to his story.
After his acclaimed portrait of the Brazilian Formula One
ace Ayrton Senna, who lost his duel with death at 34 as he was leading the San
Marino Grand Prix, the filmmaker said he had to steel himself to tackle another
sporting hero who lived life on the edge.
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Despite swearing never to make another sports film after
"Senna", Kapadia caved in when he discovered a cache of footage from
Maradona's mythic period playing for Napoli.
- Partying with the Camorra -
"It was infamous," he told a documentary
conference in Copenhagen earlier this year, with some sequences showing the
player partying with dons from the Camorra, the Neopolitan mafia.
They were meant to go into a 1991 documentary that was never
shown.
"We managed to get our hands on them and thought, 'He
is really interesting and his journey is incredible.' What he gets up to, and
what happens to him, has much wider themes," Kapadia said.
Maradona also agreed to talk, sitting down for three long
interviews because "he liked 'Senna'. That was one of the reasons we were
able to get through the door."
Kapadia, who has invented his own genre of "true
fiction" documentaries, concentrates on Maradona's Naples years, the most
operatic part of his career.
Between 1984, when he was welcomed to the city by 70,000
fans, to 1991 when he failed a drugs test because of his cocaine habit,
Maradona's magic left foot won the club two Serie A Italian championships and
his "hand of God" goal put England out of the World Cup in 1986.
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But Kapadia said he was just as interested in Maradona after
his fall.
"After two films about people who tragically died young
I wanted to test myself with somebody who is still around. It's a different
type of story -- of what happens when you get older if you're a star."
Like Senna and Winehouse, Maradona is "another person
who felt like he was fighting a system", Kapadia insisted.
"This is the third part of a trilogy on child geniuses
and fame, and the effect it can have, and what they mean to their country and
what they mean to people," he told The Guardian.
- Ravaged hero -
Maradona's status as "half man, half God" has
drawn director after director to his rollercoaster life story.
Two-time Cannes winner Emir Kusturica, who tackled him in
his 2008 documentary "Maradona by Kusturica", identified three
Maradonas: "The football teacher, the politically incorrect citizen and
the family man."
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Italian Oscar winner Paolo Sorrentino created an
unforgettable image of the ravaged hero in "Youth", his movie on
ageing, with an overweight Maradona lookalike in an oxygen mask doing kick ups
with a tennis ball.
That tragic but defiant figure is the heart of a new
Maradona play in Paris based on a book by Argentinian writer Alicia Dujovne
Ortiz, where this "demi-god tries to escape destiny for something
worse".
The big-budget Amazon series "Maradona" -- which
will go out later this year -- follows the "Golden Boy" from the
cradle through the highs and lows of his career at Sevilla, Barcelona and
Napoli, with a relay of actors playing Maradona through the ages.
All eyes at Cannes will be on how the hugely unpredictable
icon performs before the eyes of the world, having made headlines at the last
World Cup in Moscow with his antics in the stands.
Never one to avoid the grand gesture, he dedicated a recent
victory of the Mexican club he manages, Dorados de Sinaloa, to the Venezuelan
leader Nicolas Maduro, who has just survived a coup attempt.
Maradona had previously fallen asleep during one of Maduro's
speeches and had to be woken when the cameras turned to him when the president
praised him.