MARION
2024 · 13m · United Kingdom
Directed by Finn Constantine, Joe Weiland
Genres: documentary, drama, sports
Tones: contemplative, provocative, tense
Set against La Course Landaise — the French tradition of bull-jumping — the film tracks the tense thirteen minutes before Marion, a mother and the only female bull-jumper in France, makes her first performance in a packed arena. As the only woman on an all-male team, she faces down both the bulls and the misogyny around her.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The doc-narrative hybrid feels like it's trying to have it both ways—real athlete, dramatized stakes—which should be a mess but somehow refuses to pick a lane and becomes stranger and more honest for it. That's the kind of formal ambiguity that makes people mad, which means Constantine and Weiland are onto something.
The thirteen-minute real-time constraint echoes the formal rigor of sports cinema from Vigo onward, though here the tradition serves something more urgent: watching a woman's interior pressure against institutional exclusion, rendered with the composed tension of a Wiseman documentary shot through a narrative lens.
The decision to cast Noguès-Larbère performing her own story in real time—collapsing the distance between document and dramatization—means every gesture carries dual weight, and that's what makes the pre-performance silence devastate: you're watching an actual athlete metabolize actual pressure, and the camera knows it knows it.
Reviews
a short, sharp display of female empowerment and a delight to watch
blurring the lines between documentary and narrative film as it takes audiences into the sacred, male-dominated world of La Course Landaise
Festivals
- Venice Film Festival 2024
- Toronto International Film Festival 2024
- BAFTA Awards 2025, Nominee