Life is not a competition, but I’m winning

GENRE-BENDING DOCUMENTARY – 79 MIN – 2023

The documentary film form has a preference for showing their protagonists while suffering. Despite all the good intentions, such narratives tend to exploit the protagonists‘ experiences, as they are used for the dramaturgical centre of a film. Conflict drives the story. But by restricting a film to the description of pain, the cinematic stage is often given to the forces causing these painful circumstances in the first place.

In »Life is not a competition, but I’m winning« it was crucial for us to not use the protagonists’ suffering to build a suspenseful narrative. Instead, utopian moments of collective togetherness slowly weave themselves into the lives of the protagonists as well as into the visual composition of our images. Suffering and pain merge into a vision of queer community that builds a powerful counterpart to the violence that was committed.

The crew of this project was made up of women and queer people only – not only for reasons of representation, but also because the incorporation of all participants’ experiences and the atmosphere during the shooting were essential for our project.

Synopsis

If history is written by the victors, where does that leave those who were never allowed to be part of the game? A collective of queer athletes enters the Olympic Stadium in Athens and sets out to honour those who were excluded from standing on the winners’ podium. They meet Amanda Reiter, a trans* marathon runner who has to struggle with the prejudices of sports organisers and Annet Negesa, a 800m runner who was urged by the international sports federations to undergo hormone-altering surgery. Together they create a radical utopia far from the rigid gender rules in competitive sports.

Crew & Cast

directed by Julia Fuhr Mann  cinematography Caroline Spreitzenbart  sound design Cornelia Böhm  gaffer Janne Ebel  1st AC Nadja Krüger  on-set sound Rhys Anderson  costume design Angela Queins  set design Sonja Schreiber, Mireia Vila Soriano  make-up artist Mai Strathmann  editing Merit Giesen, Melanie Jilg  vfx artists Isabelle Kramer, Fabian Peitzsch  graphic design Anna Lind Haugaard  dramaturgical advice Lena Hatebur, Susanne Bieger  3sat/ZDF Katya Mader  producer Melissa Byrne  production Sophie Ahrens, Fabian Altenried, Kristof Gerega 

with Annet Negesa, Amanda Reiter, Caitlin Fisher, Daniel Marin Medina, Chun Mei Tan, Eva Maria Jost, Jakob Levi Stahlberg, Oumou Aidara, Greta Graf

funded by FFF Bayern  winner of ARRI postproduction award  winner of British Pathé Archive Award  part of Locarno First Look  part of Into the Wild Mentoring

© Schuldenberg Films / University of Television and Film Munich / ZDF / 2023

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Festivals 

38th Settimana Internationale della Critica (SIC) – September 2023 – Venice, Italy