“The Kaiser”: the new film about Michael Schumacher’s debut with Jordan in F1 arrives

F1 and cinema: an increasingly intimate relationship The Netflix series Drive to Survive has at least the merit of having opened F1 to a previously unattainable 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 Ron Howard’s excellent attempt with the film Rush on the dualism between Niki Lauda and James Hunt in the 1976 World Championship, the GP paddock has in fact returned to the cinema or on TV with some appreciated documentaries (among others Schumacher, Brawn, Benetton Formula and Lucky!), but also and perhaps above all with unpublished works that retrace with real actors completely imaginary or real events. The Kaiser: the first official trailer And if the most striking and publicized case is evidently F1 The Movie, the cinematic blockbuster with which Formula 1 even won an Oscar for best sound, there is no shortage of other good examples, such as the Brazilian Netflix series Senna, or the film Ferrari by Michael Mann which tells a very limited period in the life of the founder of the Prancing Horse, Enzo Ferrari. And “The Kaiser” would like to follow this same path, the short film – for now – which promises to tell the story of the debut in Formula 1 of a certain Michael Schumacher and for which the first trailer has recently been published (video below). A small production for the film about Michael Schumacher However, forget the colossal diffusion of the film F1 with Brad Pitt, because very little is still known about The Kaiser, except that the production is by the small label Gray Universe Ltd, headed by the 29-year-old Bulgarian director Lubo Marinov. The first images – the trailer assures that they are “created using traditional directorial techniques and not with the use of generative artificial intelligence” – in fact 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. Among the characters represented on the screen there are also the historic manager Willi Weber, the late Eddie Jordan, 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 affairs 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 the use of crowdfunding – has already aroused considerable interest among the public of fans, with almost 70 thousand views in the first 18 hours of its publication.