AGON: Giulio Bertellis Debütfilm stellt den Sport als etwas Fremdes und Politisches dar

What does competition look like when you strip away the crowd, the medals, the ceremony?

Italian filmmaker Giulio Bertelli spent years asking himself that question — and AGON, his debut feature, releasing April 24, is the answer he arrived at. Bertelli calls the film “techno neorealism,” a term he coined almost by accident in conversation with a friend, then couldn’t shake. It lodges in the mind the same way: part Italian political cinema, part body-machine inquiry, part thriller about a female fencer navigating a sport shaped by war, masculinity, and institutional power. “I knew I wanted to make a film that was looking at the world of sport and how it got shaped through the Olympics and through its politics and where it comes from,” he told SLEEK, “and the role of the relationship with war and warfare and soldiers.”

The film is anchored by a casting choice as bold as its premise: Olympic gold medalist Alice Bellandi, cast alongside professional actors. What could have been an awkward collision of registers turned into something more fluid — partly because Bertelli himself is a former competitive offshore sailor. “She really respected me as an athlete. I did really respect her as an athlete,” he says. “We were speaking the same language.” That shared fluency shows in the film’s finest details: a scene in which Bellandi instinctively interrupts an anti-doping officer mid-question — not out of defiance, but because she’s answered this question a hundred times before — was never scripted. It happened. Bertelli kept it.

Formally, AGON deliberately disorients its rhythms: fast cuts that evoke the scroll, long stretches of near-silence. No crowd noise. No stadium roar. It’s a choice that predates COVID-19, but was clarified by it. “Watching a boxing match with no people — you hear every punch, you hear the violence of the sport.” That’s what Bertelli wanted: sport reduced to its essential brutality and grace, unmediated. His reference point isn’t ESPN. It’s Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin — a sci-fi film with no spaceships. AGON – now on MUBI. Prepare to be unsettled in the best way.

Watch AGON hier.