Life Is Not a Competition, But I’m Winning review – intelligent exploration of trans athletes

As a summer packed with sporting competitions rolls on, this documentary about trans and intersex athletes makes a timely and thoughtful contribution to the wider conversation about sports and gender. Queer film-maker Julia Fuhr Mann’s impressive first feature eschews the usual boring point-counterpoint conventions that structure so many arguments about trans athletes. Instead, Mann opts for woozy, stylised visuals with the colour temperatures turned up to the max and a collage-like approach to editing to find a route into the subject. A gaggle of athletes of various ages, nationalities and gender presentations are filmed visiting the site of the Berlin 1936 Olympics and other iconic spaces; sometimes they talk among themselves about the challenges they’ve faced in their sports while sitting on the grass or loll together affectionately on the bleachers, one participant’s head rested on the lap of another. The effect is both kind of sexy and warmly collegial at once.

Elsewhere, Ugandan runner Annet Negesa tells of discovering she was intersex at the height of her career and the devastating effects that medical interventions had on her. Trans woman Amanda Reiter, a marathon runner, calmly recounts how more often she faces hostility from outraged spectators rather than rivals on the track as the latter are often more aware that having been born a man isn’t the big advantage some make it out to be when it comes to long-distance running in terms of pace, uphill runs and stamina.

Meanwhile, the voiceover narration slyly notes how cis male athlete Michael Phelps, the most decorated athlete of all time, just happens to have a practically perfect body for sports, with a physique ideally suited to swimming and a metabolism that just so happens to produce less lactic acid than other bodies. Why does that not disqualify him while female athletes with unusually high testosterone are scrutinised, tested and policed by sports bodies? The philosopher of sexuality Michel Foucault, who wrote so perceptively about the medical control of bodies, would have loved this film, especially when it dares to get a little more pretentious and artsy fartsy than the usual sport doc.

• Life Is Not a Competition, But I’m Winning is on Mubi from 26 July.