As a title Agon is a bit esoteric. The root word from which English gets “agonist”, “protagonist” and so on, it’s also the source of the word “agony”. But to the Ancient Greeks the Agon was also an athletics competition. Director Giulio Bertelli’s choice of titles may be abstruse but it is apt – his film is about the struggles of three female athletes as they compete in the entirely fictional 2024 Olympic Games at Ludoj. While we’re in the realm of etymology, “Ludoj”, the linguists will know, is the Esperanto word for “Games”.
The three leads are almost fictional too. Two of them, Yile Yara Vianello and Sofija Zobina, are professional actors – you can see them in Alice Rohrwacher’s 2023 movie La Chimera. The third, Alice Bellandi, is an actual athlete, a judoka who competed in and won gold at the 2024 Olympics. The real Olympics in France.
This fact/fiction split means we get documentary authenticity from Bellandi, while Vianello and Zobina allow Bertelli – once a professional sportsman himself – to go behind the scenes. Do Olympians ever stuff their faces with junk food? Do they assuage the loneliness of the long-distance athlete with a bit of recreational masturbation? Asked and answered.
Bellandi is the real focus, from the grim footage of her having a knee operation to the struggle to regain fitness before the Games, hers is the story we follow most forensically, though both fencer Giovanna Falconetti (Vianello) and sharpshooter Alex Sokolov (Zobina) have hills to climb – Falconetti getting involved in a horrific fencing accident, Sokolov falling foul of the Olympic authorities after footage of her shooting animals for fun finds it way online.
Bertelli has deliberately chosen disciplines with martial origins – fighting, one way or another – and sets up a dramatic contrast early on between the combative nature of competition and the peaceful aims of the modern Olympics.
His technique is for the most part to mimic the eavesdropping sports documentary, lurking in the background as the analytical Falconetti discusses stats with her trainer, or the media-friendly Sokolov parries awkward questions from journalists with a cool smile. He’s there to catch the young women on the sponsorship trail, a grind almost as tough as the training. All familiar enough.
But then he sails off into areas the straightforward documentary would not go – we see the strange procedure of the urine test from the athlete’s perspective, for example, the peeing into a container while a supervisor keeps an eye out for funny business. And further than that, into fantasy. At one point Falconetti disappears into a video game.
It’s an interesting, inventive and imaginative way of getting to what Werner Herzog would label the “ecstatic truth”. Bertelli wants to locate us in the minds of the athletes in a way that slo-mo footage and talk of personal bests cannot achieve. He claims his inspirations were Francesco Rosi’s 1965 bullfighting drama The Moment of Truth, Coppola’s The Conversation and Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin. I’d not have guessed but these are not bad places to be looking for inspiration.
There’s very little glamour here. These young women train a lot, spend a lot of time in lonely seclusion and have very little in the way of emotional support. Sokolov spends much of her downtime trying to have a meaningful phone conversation with a boyfriend who’s clearly gone off the boil.
Though it builds ultimately to a thrilling climax, the overall tone is doomy, fatalistic and not much fun. Why do these young women do it? The question hangs there asked and unanswered, though escape is one obvious possibility and glory another. But what of the athletes who train for years and then fail on the day? It’s a cruel world and Bertelli hybrid captures the physical pain and emotional heartache of competing at this level in punishing detail. Agon-y.
Agon – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
