RAFA, an upcoming Netflix documentary series about tennis great Rafael Nadal, will compete for Primetime Emmys rather than Sports Emmys, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.
Directed by Oscar nominee Zachary Heinzerling (Cutie and the Boxer), the four-part series, which will drop on May 29, chronicles the final year of the 22-time Grand Slam champion’s career, back in 2024, as he grappled with injuries, became a father and decided to retire. It features never-before-seen archival footage and new interviews with Nadal, Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic and John McEnroe, among others.
Netflix intends to push the project not only for best documentary series — in which three sports-related projects have won in the last six years, 2020’s The Last Dance, 2024’s Beckham and 2025’s 100 Foot Wave — but also for its directing, editing, cinematography, sound mixing, sound editing and score.
More than half of RAFA is in Spanish, which would make it the first primarily non-English-language project to land a best documentary series Emmy nomination.
The series was produced by Skydance Sports, which previously backed narrative projects like Amazon’s Golden Globe-nominated Air and nonfiction projects like HBO’s Hard Knocks: Offseason with the New York Giants. Its upcoming projects include an Apple TV+ doc on UConn’s women’s basketball team, Dan Fogelman’s Hulu drama series The Land and a Paramount film about the 1980s New York Giants.
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