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Oscar-Winning Director Asif Kapadia “Spent Decade On U.S. Watch List After Taxi Driver Reported Him”
The Amy director says he was reported by a taxi driver who observed him taking photographs of New York.
Although he was on that occasion allowed to travel, Kapadia said he went on a watch list for nearly a decade afterwards, meaning he would be stopped and interviewed every time he attempted to board a plane: For several years, he avoided travelling to the US and, when he was forced to, produced a letter from Universal Studios to say: “Asif is working on this project for us.” He said “being watched and paranoid” became his normal. Kapadia, who also directed documentaries Senna and Diego Maradona, has spent years making his new film 2073, a genre-defying sci-fi feature set in “New San Francisco”, in the aftermath of an undefined civilisational catastrophe.
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