F1 and cinema: an increasingly intimate relationship
The Netflix series Drive to Survive has at the very least the merit of having opened F1 to a previously unreachable world, that of consumer audiovisual products even for large masses of people (not necessarily super racing fans). And the next subject could be none other than Michael Schumacher… A few years after the excellent attempt by Ron Howard with the film Rush on the dualism between Niki Lauda and James Hunt in the 1976 World Championship, the GP paddock has indeed returned to cinema or TV with several appreciated documentaries (among others Schumacher, Brawn, Benetton Formula and Lucky!), but also and perhaps above all with original works that retrace with real actors events of total fantasy or that actually happened.
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The Kaiser: the first official trailer
And if the most striking and publicized case is clearly F1 The Movie, the cinematic blockbuster with which Formula 1 has even won an Oscar for best sound, there are other high-level examples, such as the Brazilian Netflix series Senna, or Michael Mann’s film Ferrari which tells of a very limited period in the life of the founder of the Prancing Horse, Enzo Ferrari. And it is on this same path that “The Kaiser” would like to position itself, the short film – for now – that promises to tell the Formula 1 debut of a certain Michael Schumacher and of which the first trailer has recently been published (video below).
A small production for the film about Michael Schumacher
Forget, however, the colossal distribution of the F1 film with Brad Pitt, because very little is still known about The Kaiser, other than that the production is by the small label Grey Universe Ltd, headed by 29-year-old Bulgarian director Lubo Marinov. The first images – the trailer ensures they are “created using traditional directing techniques and not with the use of generative artificial intelligence” – indeed show the story of the first steps in F1 of the seven-time world champion, played by Zhivko Sirakov, and his debut at Spa-Francorchamps in the 1991 Belgian GP.
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Among the characters represented on screen are also the historic manager Willi Weber, the late Eddie Jordan, and Schumacher’s wife, Corinna Betsch. But also the first real rival in F1, Ayrton Senna, and Bertrand Gachot, that is, the former Belgian driver whose legal troubles effectively created the conditions for Schumi’s surprise debut with Jordan in the middle of the ’91 season. The short has an estimated duration of 20-25 minutes and is considered by the authors themselves as a “feasibility test for a future film production”. Meanwhile, on YouTube, the trailer for The Kaiser – a film also financed through crowdfunding – has already aroused considerable interest among fans, with almost 70,000 views in the first 18 hours since its publication.
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