I'll Go Again
1977 · 41m · Canada
Directed by Paul Cowan
Genres: documentary, sports
Tones: contemplative, tender
Four athletes and a team who trained for the 1976 Olympics but did not reach the podium reflect on whether the courage and effort of competing were still worthwhile in the end.
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Everyone expects the Olympics doc to genuflect at the altar of triumph, so Cowan just... doesn't—he sits with four people who *didn't* medal and lets them articulate why trying mattered anyway, which is either insufferably earnest or genuinely subversive depending on your mood, and honestly I'm still not sure which.
Shot in 1977 with the restraint of cinema-vérité and structured as something closer to philosophical inquiry than sports journalism, *I'll Go Again* positions itself in the lineage of humanist documentary—the kind that trusts reflection over narrative momentum, and Cowan's refusal to sentimentalize failure becomes the film's formal argument.
The decision to let silence and the athletes' own words do the work—no stirring score, no montage shortcuts—means everything rests on casting the right people and letting the camera find the moment of real thought crossing a face, which Cowan clearly did.