What Are You Running For?
1973 · 38m · Canada
Directed by Jacques Bobet
Genres: documentary, sports
Tones: contemplative
Competitors from across Quebec run the 67-kilometre Fernand Grenier relay between La Guadeloupe and Lac Megantic over five hours in October. Filmed without commentary and often in multi-image, the documentary follows the entire annual race from village to village.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 38-minute relay race doc sounds like the safest possible premise, but Bobet's refusal to narrate and his choice to fragment the action across multiple simultaneous images turns a civic endurance event into something genuinely estranging—you're never quite sure which runner to follow, which is the point.
Bobet's formal restraint here—no commentary, no score, the deliberate use of split-screen to choreograph the landscape and effort across a five-hour event—situates this squarely in a lineage of structural documentary that treats form as argument, reminiscent of Wiseman's observational rigor but with a distinctly Quebec sensibility.
The multi-image approach isn't decorative; it's the decision that makes this work—by refusing to center any single runner, Bobet forces you to track rhythm and exhaustion across the frame simultaneously, turning a modest sports doc into a meditation on collective human effort with almost no budget spent on anything but presence.