Using a mixture of fictional and documentary scenes director Julia Fuhr Mann will, in Life Is Not a Competition But I’m Winning, “create a utopian world where athletes are not classified according to their sex or gender, but are given space to show their uniqueness.”
During her Munich pitch she stressed how she loved sports and the associated emotional highs, “but what I don’t like at all, in sports we are told over and over again: ‘yes, women can do sports too, of course, but men in general are stronger and better and more competitive than women.’ There is always the women’s final and the real [one], the men’s final. And also we are told that there are only these two categories: men and women, nothing in between, no line connecting these categories. But we think it’s not that simple. Our film wants to tangle up these narrow ideas of sports.”
The €333,000-budgeted film, for which approximated €100k is still needed, is produced by Sophie Ahrens and Melissa Byrne for Berlin-based Schuldenberg Film. Shooting is scheduled May-October 2021 ahead of a Spring 2022 delivery.
Fuhr Mann outlined the film’s structure: “Layer one will be archival footage in our film, archival footage of athletes who were bending the gender rules in sports history. The second layer will be documentary and focus on gender-bending athletes of our time. And finally there will be a fictional layer with a runners gang, who is creating their own rules and creating a queer feminist utopia of sports.”
Producer Byrne said that archive will take up approximately 25% of the film’s length, and will help tell some of the fascinating stories from the past, but also illustrate some of the anomalies. She tells how women were considered too weak to run the 800 metres and were so barred from competition for 30 years from 1928.
“Then there was Stella Walsh, a top athlete of the 1930s. They said she looks too much like a man to be a woman. In the 1980s there was Florence Griffith-Joyner. They said with her fancy long fingernails she looks too much like a woman to be a real athlete. We want to honour these runners’ almost forgotten stories, want to memorialize them and build on the struggles they had to face,” says Byrne, who was looking for distribution world sales interest during DOK. Forum.
Added director Fuhr Mann: “Usually sports are not seen as very political – but we think that sports really shape our view of the world, concerning gender, but also of race and class. Our film team is very diverse, involving only women and/or queer people and together we want to create a very colourful, powerful, queer, feminist film, not focusing on the pain again, but on [the] visions we have.”
The British Pathé Archive Award offers British Pathé archive material worth €15,000, or alternatively €2,500 in cash. The prize citation read: “Our audiovisual heritage is our preserved memory. In this collective memory we can find many beautiful as well as uncomfortable perspectives on ourselves that were never the conscious intention of the recorder. With their new examination of our past, the director and producer of Life Is Not a Competition, But I’m Winning bring us into the present day. By mirroring the power of our collective adherence to norms and narratives, they question our willingness to change. The project by Julia Fuhr Mann, Sophie Ahrens and Melissa Byrne deals with the utopian potential of competitive sport beyond rigid gender boundaries and images.”
