In His Debut Feature Film ‘Agon,’ Giulio Bertelli Captures the Agony and Ecstasy of Professional Sports

One of those links is between the three sports you focus on—judo, fencing, rifle shooting—and war. They were all sports that were developed during times of peace, but have their origins in times of war. Was there anything you felt was especially timely about focusing on those sports?

I think so. I think in the context of, probably after the Second World War, our sense of abstraction to violence, generally. I mean, it’s clear to me that there is a bit of a provocation when I make this connection, for instance, to a sport like rifle shooting or pistol shooting, and going back to the fact that it was once really the main sport of the Olympic Games. The founder himself, Pierre de Coubertin was a pistol shooter himself, but at the same time, I was also interested in the new sports being added to the Olympics—you’re adding skateboarding, you’re adding surfing, you’re adding breakdance—but I don’t think today, if it wasn’t already there, you would be adding a firearm-based sport to the slate of the Olympic sports. And on the other hand, you have pentathlon, where the pistol has been replaced with a laser gun. I think it says a lot about our relationship and how we relate with the idea of violence. I was also interested in understanding how the perception of firearms really has a strong sort of cultural bias. Different countries see them in very different ways.

The film also paints quite a grueling picture of what it’s like to be a professional athlete. Were there elements of your experiences working in the world of sport and sailing that you brought to the film?

I think my background as a professional athlete in the sport of offshore sailing has definitely been fundamental to addressing some of the topics in the movie—mostly how it feels. There are a lot of things that you get out of research, but I think there are certain elements are in the movie that I feel are very close to me. I think this is this idea of loneliness, and the relationship with treatment and injuries and pain, more of this physical part. Then, stuff like the media sort of shit-fight or the trial that Giovanna Falconetti goes through, those are things that I have no experience in, but through research and friends that are athletes in other sports, helped me to understand. I wanted it to be very realistic, and a lot of it has been made and developed and written together with top professionals in each category, especially the elements relating to this fictional Olympic Games as a sort of a geopolitical platform. There’s maybe a lot more that I could have said in there, but then sometimes I think I already tried to put in too much, but that’s the person I am. I could have long conversations about some of the smallest things in the movie—I just think it’s a very fascinating system.