by Jill Jaracz
When you have to wait a couple of years between Olympics, it’s always fun to watch Olympics movies to fill the void. I’m a little surprised that we don’t have a massive catalog of Olympic-related movies (that aren’t produced by the International Olympic Committee), because there should be tons of Olympics movies. Each edition of the Olympics comes with thousands of athlete stories or amazing competitions. Only a tiny fraction have made it to the silver screen. Sure, it’s incredibly difficult to get a movie made, but it also may be too difficult to get the rights to use Olympic intellectual property.
That said, whenever I hear about a new Olympics movie, I get insanely excited. Most recently, September 5 and The Fire Inside made brief appearances in theaters. They did not disappoint. This fall two more movies might be coming to theaters near you.
The Track slides through the film festival circuit
First up is a documentary called The Track by Ryan Sidhoo, which is about three young Bosnian athletes who aspire to become Olympic lugers. Where do they train? The Sarajevo 1984 sliding track.
I was astounded when I saw this–people are really using the Sarajevo track again! Typically the only time we hear about this track is when a news outlet wants to show all of the Olympic white elephant stadiums.The Sarajevo track always makes the list, even though the reason it’s fallen apart is because the city was part of a war in the early 1990s. A stadium abandoned due to bombing is a whole lot different than putting a lock on the front door (I’m looking at you, Athens 2004).
Anyway, Sidhoo discovered athletes were training here in 2016, and followed Mirza Nikolajev, Hamza Pleho and Zlatan Jakic as they aimed to compete at Beijing 2022 (SPOILER ALERT: One of them makes it).
It’s been playing on the film festival circuit, most recently at the Sarajevo Film Festival. I’m hopeful it will get a distribution deal!
Agon reimagines the Olympic development of sport
The other movie that’s coming soon is decidedly different. It’s an Italian film called Agon, the directorial debut from Giulio Bertelli. Bertelli is a multihyphenate who, along with filmmaking, is involved with performance sailboat development, lectures about architecture, and has a freeze-dried food company. And mom and dad are fashion hard-hitters Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli.
Agon is fictional, set during the Ludoj 2024 Olympics. The movie follows three women in fighting sports–shooting, fencing and judo–and explores the development of these sports from war exercises to sport (if you heard my rant about some World Games events being drills vs. sports, I bet I would’ve thought the same about these sports back when they were evolving).
Olympian Judo-ka Alice Bellandi, who competed at Tokyo 2020 and won gold at Paris 2024, portrays the judo athlete.
Agon is showing in competition at Venice Critics Week 2025, which runs through September 6. We don’t yet know if it will have further distribution, but I’ve got my fingers crossed that it will at least be playing in Italy during Milano-Cortina 2026. The last fictional movie set at the Olympics (that I recall) is Olympic Dreams. That movie was written by and starred Nick Kroll and Olympian Alexi Pappas. That was set at PyeongChang 2018 and was sort of a rom-com (but not a ton of com) that explored a relationship between an athlete and a volunteer dentist at the Games.
I’m guessing Agon doesn’t fall in the same category. The trailer doesn’t give me much to go on, other than that this could be arty:
What do you think? If these show up on a screen near you, will you watch them? Let us know!