At the 2025 Venice Film Festival, the selection of the Settimana Internazionale della Critica, along with other works by debut directors presented in Orizzonti, offered a stimulating panorama of what new filmmakers are pursuing in aesthetic and thematic terms. Social dramas, political allegories, and existential questions revealed not only a connection with the urgencies of the present but also a vision oriented toward the cinema of the future. Entrusted with awarding the prize for Best First Feature Film, the FIPRESCI jury chose the work that best encompassed these concerns: Agon, by Giulio Bertelli.
The title carries two meanings. “Agon,” in its Greek origin, is used in sporting, military, legal, and literary contexts to signify struggle, competition, or conflict. “Agon” also translates as agony, the frustration of being unable to achieve something deeply desired. It is precisely this dual struggle—external and internal—that the film’s main characters must endure. Three young women, Olympic athletes, are confronted by the epigraph that opens the film: a line written in 1892 by Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympic Games, declaring that athletes must always remain imbued with the idea that they are waging war, so that their energy will never end.
We may feel we have seen this film before, whether in fiction or documentary form: stories of struggle, of transcending one’s own limits—narratives intrinsic to sports. Yet what surprises is the audacity of the young writer-director Bertelli, who resists cliché and offers a fresh perspective on the theme. He does so, first of all, by setting aside the “warriors” of whom Baron de Coubertin spoke—the men—and focusing exclusively on women, imagining, for instance, what a Joan of Arc of the new millennium might look like. If we do not recognize actresses Yile Vianello and Sofia Zabina, both of whom appeared in Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera, we could easily swear we were watching a documentary. The most recognizable face belongs to Italian judoka Alice Bellandi, Olympic gold medalist in Paris 2024, who plays herself.
And yet Agon is a work of fiction, set at the imaginary 2024 Ludoj Olympics, where competitions no longer take place on fields, courts, or gymnasiums, but instead inside studios without live audiences, designed primarily for capturing images and sound—akin to an e-sports tournament. Technology assumes greater importance than the human element, and athletes are treated as machines programmed to win, as cogs in a system that seeks—but ultimately fails—to dehumanize them.
Technology thus becomes a character in its own right. From unsettling images of a knee arthroscopy, to software designed to enhance athletic performance, this universe is mediated by cameras that lend the film a metalinguistic dimension. One cannot think about the future of cinema without reckoning with the dependence—or alliance—on what each image-generating device affords. And Bertelli, himself a former athlete with a background in architecture, displays a veteran’s authority in the careful orchestration of mise-en-scène to translate this world convincingly.
Therefore, even as Agon at times flirts with video art, there is profound realism in the way the personal dramas of Bellandi, fencer Giovanna Falconetti (Vianello), and sport shooting Alex Sokolov (Zabina) unfold—each grappling with issues that transcend sport itself. These are stories of champions, of women who live to fight and win, yet who have not been transformed into robots. Precisely because they are human, they fail. Giulio Bertelli too will one day fail as a filmmaker, but his debut feature demonstrates that he has more than enough talent to face that battle.
Marcelo Janot
Edited by Robert Horton
© FIPRESCI 2025