Something to watch tonight: Tuesday 29 July
Senna (Kapadia, 2010)
In the absence of a timely film festival guide, I thought I would go back through previous previews and see if there was anything from previous years that would fit the bill.
As is often the case, many contenders simply aren’t available to stream in New Zealand. AroVision continues to fight the good fight and, if you are looking for something good-but-forgotten, I recommend David Zellner’s 2014 oddity Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter which you can rent from them. A Fargo-obsessed Japanese woman searches snowy Minnesota for a buried suitcase full of money.
I interviewed Zellner for the Rancho Notorious podcast prior to the 2014 festival and an excellent conversation it was.
I recommended Asif Kapadia’s superb documentary Senna in the 2011 festival preview1 and then gave it a few more words when it was released to cinemas in September that year:
Despite my positive review for TT3D last week, I’m not a huge motorsport fan. In 1996 I worked on the last Nissan Mobil 500 race around the waterfront and couldn’t see the appeal of watching cars go belting around the same corner over and over again. In that race you couldn’t even tell who was winning, it was all such a blur. In fact, the only time I’ve ever watched Formula 1 was when I channel surfed on to some late night coverage one Sunday night in 1994 just before going to bed. Two corners (about 30 seconds) later, Ayrton Senna was dead. It was pretty freaky, let me tell you.
So, I knew (as all audiences must) that Asif Kapadia’s brilliant documentary Senna was going to end in tragedy. What I didn’t know was how riveting it was going to be from beginning to end. Senna works because it is first and foremost a portrait of a compelling character – a charismatic, confident but humble young man who understood the risks he took and fought to balance those risks with his innate desire to race and race hard – but when the politics of Formula 1 took the control of those risks out of his hands you could see there was only going to be one result.
Using only archive footage, with no narrator and no talking heads – the story is told through audio interviews with many of the characters – Senna is exemplary documentary storytelling and one of the very best films of the year.
Also in that 2011 Capital Times column: Joe Wright’s thriller Hanna, the restored Footrot Flats: The Dog’s Tale, Final Destination 5 and Italian mystery The Double Hour.
Where to watch Senna
Aotearoa, Australia, Canada, Ireland, India, USA, UK: Streaming on Netflix2
No link because all the images on that page have disappeared and I need to reupload them.
The clock is ticking on this one as Netflix has it marked for removal.