Giulio Bertelli © Jorge BispoAn Interview with Giulio Bertelli Gary M. Kramer July 2026 Interviews Issue 118 Giulio Bertelli’s remarkable feature debut, Agon, depicts three women competing in a fictional Olympics at Ludoj in 2024. But this is not an inspirational sports film. Bertelli is probing the physical and mental capacities of these athletes. His protagonists – Alice (Alice Bellandi), a judoka, Alex (Sofija Zobina), a sharpshooter, and Giovanna (Yile Yara Vianello), a fencer – all face challenges, from injuries to controversies that may derail their performance and their careers. The film’s emphasis is less on the drama of the competition and more on experiences that inform the lives of these athletes. It is fascinating watching the women train or have physical therapy that pushes their limits. They are seen undergoing drug testing, one loses a sponsorship, and even their eating habits are scrutinised. These young women are dedicated to their respective sports, but watching Agon can be an endurance test; each athlete confronts their love of the game as they experience physical and/or emotional traumas. Visually, Agon is arresting. The camerawork for the gaming mirrors the stillness of Alex’s shooting, the fleetness of Giovanna’s jousting, and the tumbling of Alice’s judo. There are also scenes of technology, from video games to medical procedures, and the manufacturing of the bullets and fencing masks used in the games to show the worlds beyond the sports arena. Agon Bertelli originally conceived the project as an animated film – a modern version of Joan of Arc as an Olympic fencer – with the Olympics as a backdrop for a trial. He described it as “a geopolitical thriller with war fought in the proxy of sports between nations.” Agon is a different film that arose from that original idea. The writer/director spoke with Senses of Cinema at this year’s edition of New Directors/New Films. – G.M.K. What research did you do into the Olympic world and the related industries, from athletic training to medical procedures, manufacturing, and technology? It is fictional despite one storyline being based on a real-life incident. The film is very fictional, but it does use this realism in terms of cinematic hermeneutics. It would be hard to create the illusion of a fictional Olympics, so I had to include elements like having a real judoka [Alice Bellandi]. I also had a certain visual approach in the beginning to take the audience by the hand and move them into the more fictional, almost oneiric territory in the second part of the film. The research is the part of the film I prefer – the idea of a profound investigation of something where the story is a tool in a wider scope of synthesising ideas. Part of the research comes from my personal, privileged background where I had been a professional athlete. Athletes are people who live though clinics, and medical treatments, which I knew through my own experience. I also have a strong fascination with details of how things work, and are made, and operate. When I started to pick the sports that are most relevant to my argument for this correlation between the history of warfare and sport – which the Olympics came out of – I did research on each sport. The more you dig the more interesting it becomes. Rifle shooting is quite impressive; even the technical rulebooks are such complex literature. Talking to athletes and professionals, and reading all the rule books, it was a lot of work. Agon The film is very organic/mechanic; we see human bodies and the technology side by side. One can’t operate without the other. This was obviously intentional. What are you saying about bodies being like machines, or how technology is taking over our lives and even changing the way we play sports? Of course, it’s a conscious decision. In my writing and imagination, I have always been strongly interested in organic matter and technology. But I am not interested in a metaphor or a speculation in a way similar to Cronenberg – and I love his cinema, he is a huge influence of mine – but all my stories have some elements of this interaction. I like it when the metaphor is not there and it’s just a very clear graphic juxtaposition of a body being carved by a machine during surgery, or a body being attached to some device. I have this feeling that the film is received or perceived as dystopic, but that was not intentional. I’m not against technology. I am acknowledging that our lives have been intertwined with mechanical apparatus for a long time, and in a much deeper sense. What can you say about filming bodies during the training and competition scenes as well as the physical therapy and moments of rest? You shoot them very deliberately and we see them being pushed to their limits at times. There was a necessity with this theatrical backdrop and background that a wide shot is connecting the dots about how this strange world operates. I wanted strong emotional connection through a visceral experience. If the wide shot is a controlled part of me, the shooting and photography and the closeup are my curiosity driving how I would frame it. In one competition scene, we are in a black box, recording bodies. I did this to have a very strong difference from the rest of the film. Most of the competition was not shot with a wide lens, so to have a rigged camera with a super-long lens to explore these bodies, or the texture of fabric touching skin, and using slow motion helped to convey these details and ideas. You immerse viewers in these athlete’s world. This is not an inspirational sports film or a competition drama. What accounted for your immersive approach? I was interested in the idea of going back to the emotional connections of the characters and portraying the context of sports – which is something everyone can relate to. How does it feel not to be able to do what you want to do – reaching a certain goal or having problems in life that that prevent you from doing something, whether you can control them, or there is an outside element. There was the need to tell the stories of the many athletes who don’t succeed. Not in a pitiful way. In professional sports as an elite athlete, you are part of a very, very small minority. And out of this minority, there is only one who gets gold and few who get to the podium. As an athlete, you may go through a 15-30-year career without ever having any success in the traditional sense. Ultimately, in sports, it is about winning by respecting the rules. There is something fascinating about this awareness of going in and trying to win knowing that most likely, you will not be the one winning the gold. Agon Agon is both critical and celebratory in this way. It is both. There is a celebration of the fatigue and a desire to showcase that it is very hard and most of the time, you don’t make it. We do not get much backstory about the characters or learn much about their personal lives. We don’t see their families. There are only a few interactions with their coaches. We sit with these athletes, which helps us get to know and understand them. Can you talk about how you presented these women? I wanted to convey this idea that they are bodies within a machine. It was as if there is an apparatus – which is the film itself, or this “machine” of the Olympics – that bodies are consumable for our entertainment, and for their spirit of survival. It was important to show this through the language of the storytelling and the idea of watching certain videos. What can I tell the audience and inform them about the characters’ obsessions, interests, or desires through a distant approach? We see Alice watching a video, and we understand her obsession to find a solution to better recovery. I wanted to have the opportunity – and I don’t know if I succeeded; it’s not for me to say – in the second half of the film for the characters to converge and become almost one. You could swap the events of each character in a speculative way, so there is an overlapping that creates this illusion. What can you say about the ethics in Agon? Ethics are important. If you were putting a new sport in the Olympics, would you choose a sport with a firearm? Guns are there because it was the first sport in the modern Olympics. Fencing is not a contact sport, but it does mimic killing your opponent with a sword. When an accident happens [in the film], it opens a window on history and breaks the filter between our idea of sport and reality. Judo and morality – in my film, we show someone getting injured. The Judo International Federation does not allow anyone injured to be filmed. When I was doing research, I took pictures [of judokas], and when athletes were bleeding, security came and asked me to delete the pictures. If someone gets injured [during a filmed event], they will cut away from the shot because they don’t want to acknowledge the risk of injury. With rifle shooting, I got help from the Italian Federation. They wanted to make sure that, in my story, if she was caught poaching, they would kick her off the team. But the perception of rifle shooting is different in each country. The U.S. has a different relationship with firearms than Italy does, and Northern Europe have different ideas about shooting and hunting. In 2026, the Italian Federation would kick you out for hunting. But if you are Norwegian, they are less [restrictive]. There are strong cultural differences that influence how each Federation behaves. The film is very accomplished in both its sound and visuals. You feature gunshots that punctuate Alex’s scenes, you shoot the judo and fencing in ways that mirror the sport’s movement. You introduce video gaming and fabrication of the materials used in the games. Can you discuss your strategy here? Moving images do not belong only to cinema. I wanted to showcase this blend of different tools using the same fundamental technology. I don’t listen to music as a person. I have a very acute ear for sounds and textures. A lot of that was in the script – scenes were described by the sound of a machine. When I got [composer] Tom Wheatley on board to work on the score, I said I wanted to build a score out of the sound recorded on set. I wanted to have this transition where you don’t know if it was the sound of music or of a machine. An explicit soundscape can generate tension. When a character is running on the treadmill, she has a microphone inside her mask so we can hear her. The exact opposite was in the tracking shot used in the interview with the fencer. Because it was a very cinematic shot, I wanted to maintain this rawness. I wanted it to be like someone shooting with an iPhone – stealing the image of the interview from outside. I kept the sound very broken and had it only coming from the boom. I made it more “dirty” in a way, and “ruined” the sound. There was a conscious process of playing with the contrast between what we see and what we hear. Agon We root for these women and feel for them with each setback. What do you want viewers to feel watching Agon? This comes from my personal experience as an athlete. There is a lot of pain, whether it is physical or emotional. The reality is you spend years in a situation that is not positive all the time. It’s quite negative. It is the job of an athlete to find that positivity so you can compete and win. I would like audiences to take this very explicit relationship with competition and frustration and see what they can learn from it or discuss it with people who are not in such an extreme environment. I don’t have an answer, but the question is very relevant. Frustration is common beyond sports. In sports, it is very deliberate, and you can express it because competition is part of your job. There is something there about this consciousness of the athlete that could help non athletes. I can’t help but think that filmmaking is like being an athlete – you have to find calm and stillness amid all the chaos. If you were an Olympic athlete, what sport would you chose to compete in? [Thinks.] That’s a good question. The Biathlon. It’s a winter Olympic sport. [It combines cross-country skiing with rifle shooting.] There was a moment where the film might have just been a winter sports film on one character in the biathlon. I think it is one of the most fascinating sports. There is a super strong combination between rifle shooting and this incredible physical effort. I really like that – even though I have never shot a gun. But the idea of having to do something super precise after a very physical effort appeals to me. Are you a good skier? No. It’s just a fascination. I am a good sailor, and I play football, like most Italians, but I have never skied to be honest.
