LIFE IS NOT A COMPETITION, BUT I’M WINNING

If history is written by the winners – where does that leave those who were never allowed to compete? A group of queer runners gathers in the Olympic Stadium in Athens, and later in Berlin, to give a platform to those excluded from the history of sport. Amanda Reiter, a marathon runner and trans, speaks of exclusion from competitions; Annet Negesa, an 800-metre runner, of an operation she was pressured into and that cannot be undone. Interwoven with this are archive images: Lina Radke, who won Olympic gold in 1928 and was destroyed by the scandal over a competitor’s collapse; Stella Walsh; Wilma Rudolph, who won three times in Rome in 1960. “Life Is Not a Competition, But I’m Winning” by Julia Fuhr Mann, a German film from 2023, cuts the present into the past.

The German director Julia Fuhr Mann calls her film a poetic-radical utopia: a documentary with fictional elements, in which the protagonists appear like Zeligs in the old footage and pay the pioneering women the solidarity they lacked at the time. 79 minutes that do not seek to abolish competitive sport but to question its rules. It premiered in 2023 in the Settimana Internazionale della Critica in Venice. The film was shown at Around the World in 14 Films in Berlin in 2023.

Shown at the 2023 edition of Around the World in 14 Films.

All films 2023 · Film Archive