Marathon

Director: Carlos Saura

1993 / 130min / Digital

In setting out to make the official film of the XXV Olympiad in the Catalan capital, Saura took the unusual step of narrowing the focus of his film to a single event, the men’s marathon, run through the streets of Barcelona. A paean to the host city and to human endurance, Saura’s visually thrilling document of the marathon—won by South Korean Hwang Young-cho, with a 2:13:23 time—comes in at a cool two-hours-and-ten-minutes, giving it a compressed energy and monomaniacal focus that sets it aside from more comprehensive and diffuse Olympic films.

Part of Art Cinema, Olympiad, and the World