Roger Federer’s Moving Farewell to Professional Tennis Documented in “Twelve Final Days” – Tribeca Festival

In men’s tennis, as in other sports, there is always debate about which player is considered the greatest of all time. Djokovic, with his unprecedented 24 Grand Slam wins? Nadal, with his astonishing 14 French Open wins? Federer, who was the first man to win 20 Grand Slam titles? Or perhaps a player from an earlier era – Rod Laver – who won all four Grand Slam titles in a calendar year, not once, but twice?

The GOAT debate in tennis will never be resolved. But there is widespread agreement on one point: No one has ever played the game with as much grace, as much beauty, with such effortless strokes and as much economy as the man from Basel, Switzerland – Roger Federer. Therefore, tennis fans reacted with enormous sadness, but also with sincere gratitude, to the news in 2022 that Federer would bow to the times and retire from the sport he shaped for more than 20 years.

Federer: Twelve final daysdocuments the master’s departure from the professional arena, a departure that is executed as elegantly as a Federer backhand. The film, directed by Oscar winner Asif Kapadia and Joe Sabia, premiered on Monday evening at the Tribeca Festival. It will be released on Prime Video next Thursday, June 20.

“I interviewed Roger for this series I am doing for Fashion called 73 questions. I’m not talking about empty talk – it was probably one of the best interviews I’ve ever done out of 90 interviews. It was on the court at Wimbledon and it was really special,” Sabia explains in an interview with Deadline. “I think he found it such a special experience that he was willing to send me to Switzerland to film him – three years later – when he retired.”

Sabia documented behind the scenes Federer recording a video sharing the news of his decision. The news was released via Instagram on September 15, 2022.

“As many of you know, the last three years have been challenging for me with injuries and surgeries,” Federer said in the video. “I’ve worked hard to get back to full competitive shape. But I also know the capabilities and limitations of my body, and its message to me has been clear recently.”

The original idea was that Sabia would make a short documentary out of his footage – one set long, so to speak (to use a tennis analogy). But if you’re going to play one set, wouldn’t three be even more exciting? That’s where Kapadia came in.

“Joe had shot it. Joe had edited something together. Then I got a message saying, ‘Listen, would you be interested in doing a film about Roger Federer? There’s this cut.’ So I came to it much later,” says Kapadia. “The truth is, I’m at home doing the laundry and watching it. [edit] and I thought, “I’m not sure this is for me,” right? But… I’m really invested and it really moved me. And I think that’s why I thought, “Okay, this really touched me in a way that I didn’t expect.”

Kapadia says he probably realized in retrospect that the Federer project fit well into a kind of timeline of his films – about singer Amy Winehouse, racing driver Ayrton Senna and soccer star Diego Maradona.

“Amy was about a girl in her teens and twenties. Senna was a racing driver in his twenties and thirties and died in his thirties,” he notes. “Roger’s story was about someone who retired in his forties. And when I met Maradona, he was in his fifties. So somewhere there is this ‘age of man’, ‘age of people’. [theme].”

Stylistically, it is a departure from Kapadia’s previous documentaries, which introduced a new way of telling non-fiction stories: no on-camera interviews, every second is covered by archive video. This approach has influenced many other documentary filmmakers. But Federer: Twelve final days is shot much closer to the vérité style and features on-camera interviews with Federer, his family members, his on-court contemporaries, and other legends of the game, including John McEnroe and Björn Borg.

“Sometimes it’s good to do something completely different,” Kapadia notes, admitting that there have been imitators of his style in the films of Winehouse, Senna and Maradona.[If] When everyone else is doing it, you should always pivot and say, ‘Okay, I’m going to do something different.’ And that was interesting to me, the fact that it was very different from the previous work, but it’s still about the character. And the most important thing is that the film has to stay true to the character. And I think this one stays true to Roger. That’s really who he is. He’s a really good guy and he comes across that way. He’s very generous and communicative and emotional.”

The “Twelve Last Days” of the title refers to the time between Federer’s announcement that he was retiring and what would become his final tournament, the Laver Cup in London. He chose to play doubles with his tennis rival Rafael Nadal. It says a lot about Federer that when Nadal, four years his junior, came onto the professional stage and began winning titles Federer might otherwise have won, he did not spurn or loathe the upstart. They became good friends. There are many tears in the film as Federer says goodbye, many of them Nadal’s.

Now Nadal is nearing the end of his career, as is Andy Murray, the great Scottish professional and multiple Grand Slam winner. Time waits for no one, which gives the documentary its poignancy. Kapadia mentions a phrase said by another player in the film: “Athletes die twice,” once when they retire and once at the end of their lives. “That’s a very powerful phrase that you, Joe, just heard in the hallway, but in some ways it’s probably my favorite phrase when you realize, yeah, nobody has said it so succinctly. It really feels like a death. You see it in the eyes of all the other rivals.”

“They see their death at some point,” Sabia adds. “Roger even says that – every time there is a screening he says, ‘It’s like I’m seeing my funeral over and over again.’ So he’s very convinced [idea] we’re talking about. But I think what’s really compelling is that the audience gets a chance to put themselves in the shoes of – not necessarily the idea of ​​being an elite tennis player and losing that – but what identity is so close to all of us that we could imagine if it disappeared tomorrow, how would we feel?”

The best one could hope for would be to have a legacy like that of Roger Federer.