ARTS3066 - Week 1

The still above captures a moment from one of my personal favourite documentary's, Icarus. The 2017 award-winning film documents how director Byran Fogel plans to cheat the doping system implemented into international sporting regimes. His ideas stem from former world cycling champion Lance Armstrong's evasion of testing positive for performance enhancing drugs. The above image is a standout for me. It pictures what the documentary was meant to revolve around - an cyclist taking performance enhancing drugs and evading the drug testing system put in place by WADA and affiliates to prove how broken the system is. What makes the documentary truly great is that fact that it transitions quite rapidly and unexpectedly from being an analysis on world sport and doping to the documentation of a geopolitical battle of sporting supremacy to such an extent we see a man literally fighting for his life in real time. This transition is what makes this documentary so special. It is unabashedly real. Real to such and extent WADA formally used the film as one of the reasons for the ban on Russia in Olympic Sport which is still in place to this day. The documentary succeeds in every way and, in my opinion, it is a cornerstone of filmmaking in this medium.