04/09/2025 - VENICE 2025: The Italian director unpicks his close-up study of three female athletes competing at an Olympic event

(© 2025 Isabeau de Gennaro for Cineuropa - @iisadege)

Entered in the International Film Critics’ Week of the 82nd Venice International Film Festival, AGON [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Giulio Bertelli
film profile] is a close-up study of three female athletes competing at an Olympic event, relentlessly getting under the skin of each of the participants. With insight and passion, Italian director Giulio Bertelli explained some of his visions.

Cineuropa: To what extent are you a sports fan yourself, if at all?
Giulio Bertelli: I definitely am one, and even a former professional athlete myself, in offshore sailing. So, I do like sports, but I'm not someone particularly obsessive, who watches football every week. But I'm very interested in the elements hidden within each sport, which I think I try to explore in my movie.

In AGON, we follow three young Italian female athletes before, during and just after a summer Olympics. They compete in fencing, rifle shooting and judo. What led you to choose these particular disciplines?
I had a clear idea to look for sports that would help portray how we have moved on from 150 years ago to today, from a war context into sports, which is what occurred in the beginning of our modern Olympics. This is how we got sports like shooting and fencing. Judo I chose because it’s this very beautiful contact sport. And I like the idea that judo is so brutal in terms of the strength of the contact, but at the same time, it’s so renowned for being the best sport when you're a kid, and it has such incredible values.

Did you also consider sports in which Italy has had a strong tradition?
It came as a consequence. Maybe there was an unconscious part of myself that led me there, but I didn't make that connection myself. I just picked a sport that I thought was right for the story, and then, yes, it is true that Italy has been strong here.

You present each athlete together with a historical counterpart. Alice, the judoka, is Cleopatra; Alex, the shooter, is Nadezhda Durova; and Giovanna, the fencer, is Joan of Arc. Can you elaborate on this thinking?
I'm always interested in looking at some historical background and then trying to bring it into the future. Alice, the judoka who needs to have a leg operation, became Cleopatra because that was someone with considerable knowledge about medicine and body care. Alex, the shooter, became Nadezhda Durova, who fought, disguised as a man, in the Russian army during the Napoleonic wars. Her alias, in fact, was Alexander Sokolov; my shooter’s name is Alex Sokolov. Durova’s incredible story involves a hidden life, which is echoed by my shooter and her poaching activities. Then there’s Giovanna, the fencer, whose opponent is very seriously injured during their match – she is Joan of Arc, the first historical figure I came up with. Because of the accident during the games, Giovanna has to go through a process, a courthouse tribunal, enduring it from a sports and moral side of things. It’s a modern inquisition. Also, fencing has a very medieval tradition, of course. I could really speak about each of these topics for two hours, if we had the time.

AGON is an entirely fictional film, which at times can be forgotten when you watch it. If one compares it with, say, Kon Ichikawa’s documentary about the Tokyo 1964 games, his film can at times feel more fictional than yours. Where did you find your inspirations for the style?
I wanted a documentary aesthetic, yet something very cinematic, and it was important to create a distance from everything that was shot as TV sports materials for broadcast. I also avoided long lenses, slow motion and such. One film I drew inspiration from was The Moment of Truth by Francesco Rosi, a 1960s movie about a bullfighter with very observational scenes, almost like it was spying on the character. The Conversation by Francis Ford Coppola was another inspiration, as was Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Jonathan Glazer
film profile].

A fitting title, as we certainly get to go there with your athletes at these Olympics, which take place in… “Ludoj”. Where did that name come from?
“Ludoj” means “games” in Esperanto! We chose it from around 20 candidates that we made up. The strongest reason why I wanted to make my own Olympics was because I felt that it would provide an opportunity to reimagine a parallel contemporaneity of what I think a current sport event could be. “Ludoj” sounds like something that could be a city, a little like Sochi, a place I think many didn’t know of before the 2014 games. Creating the graphics and design of our own Olympics was the most fun part of pre-production.

Has anyone pointed out to you, during the process of making this film, that they knew of the Esperanto origins?
Counting them all… Zero, exactly.