Senna has won the BAFTA awards for Best Documentary and Best Editing in tonight’s event at the Royal Opera House in London, giving F1 a boost in front of a star-studded audience that included the likes of Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Russell Crowe and Meryl Streep.
To win the former award it beat Martin Scorsese’s George Harrison documentary and Project Nim, about a monkey raised as a human.
Senna producer Eric Fellner said: “This film was made by all of us with love, and all we got back from it was love, and that deeply cynical word commerciality – which I never utter – was never even considered in this situation. We made this because we loved Ayrton, and you showed the love back.”
He added: “We need to thank Ayrton Senna for sadly living a too short life, but a life where his fact was even more amazing than fiction.”
Screenwriter Manish Pandey said: “We’d just really wanted to thank the Senna family for trusting us with his legacy. When your son dies in circumstnces like that, and you get a bunch of guys who turn up and say, listen, we want to tell the story, we think we’re very sensitive, we think we will absolutely tell it right… It takes a lot of guts to support people like that, and I’d like to thank them for doing that.”
Event host Stephen Fry gave the film the ultimate accolade: “Even if you know nothing about F1 racing and are not even vaguely interested in motor sport you will find Senna one of the greatest documentaries you’ve ever watched.”
Senna was also nominated in Outstanding British Film, where it lost out to Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
The BAFTAs are regarded as a precursor of the Oscars, but sadly it did not get nominated by the Academy.
Pandey’s next project is a drama based on Mike Hawthorn and Peter Collins and their relationship with Enzo Ferrari.
Adam Cooper F1 
I would love to have a copy of the Senna film, when available in North America.