A Prayer for Joshua Jackson
2020 · 22m · USA
Directed by Ryan Heffernan, Grayson Schaffer, Kahlil Hudson
Genres: biography, documentary, sports
Tones: contemplative, tender
Race car driver Joshua Jackson confronts the end of his lifelong dream and somehow emerges more resolute on the other side.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects a sports doc to either celebrate the win or wallow in the loss—this one does neither, and that refusal is genuinely unsettling in ways the premise doesn't hint at.
A formally composed meditation on athletic mortality that earns its tenderness through restraint; the three-director approach could've been chaos, but instead it reads as a unified sensibility working in the documentary essay tradition.
The decision to let Jackson sit with silence rather than fill it with score or voiceover is the entire film—that single choice transforms a potential redemption narrative into something about presence itself, which is the kind of economy that makes you believe in what little you're given.