Tom Wheatley – AGON (OST) (PAN 166)

AGON is the directorial debut of Giulio Bertelli. It follows a triptych of female athletes as they prepare and then compete in LUDOJ 2024, a fictional Olympic Games, in their personal disciplines – judo, fencing, and rifle shooting. Informed by the historical figures of Cleopatra, Joan of Arc and Nadezhda Durova, these women are portrayed against the political, social, technological and physical contexts that dominate the highest level of sports competition and performance.

AGON explores a contemporary account of the contradictions of these sports, which began as peacetime practices for war, as their disciplines are institutionally sanitised, recast as wholesome global entertainment, and ultimately dematerialised altogether in new digital arenas.

The events at LUDOJ are conducted not in sports arenas but on soundstages, with no live audience. These spartan spaces are populated only by athletes, sports officials, and film crew, capturing every audio-visual layer of information. Within this environment, every mat crash, sword clash and gunshot is experienced in exacting detail.

Tom Wheatley’s score began as a conceptual mirror to this. He took three musicians, each with a singular approach to their instrument, each instrument having a language of articulation that relates to each sport: percussion for judo, cello for fencing, saxophone for rifle shooting. Added to this were claustrophobic analogue electronics, and bagpipes, to represent a state beyond competition: war. The rich, detailed signals from these players underwent extreme processing live in the studio, at times moving the music into a grey area between score, sound design and foley.

“I saw a material parallel between the sportsperson and the musician. That you have these tools which you carry through life, which hold complex histories of use. These techniques and traditions are studied, and combined with contemporary technologies to unlock new potentials. As Alex Sokolov is to her gun, Jean-Luc Guionnet is to his saxophone.

From this model sprung many ideas, which lay the foundation for the score: applying the gestural language of the fencing epee to Ute’s bow; the ‘tuned air’ of both the rifle and the saxophone; taking the judo concept of barycentre and applying that to a form of rhythmic gravity with Seijiro. It was a rich seam”
– Tom Wheatley

“Where realism and fiction are blurred in the world of AGON, Tom accomplished the same for the score, obfuscating the boundary between the acoustic landscape of the film and the music, respecting the theoretical framework of the film itself.”
– Giulio Bertelli

AGON premiered at Venice Film Festival 2025, was awarded the Luciano Sovena Award for Best Independent Production, and the FIPRESCI Award (International Federation of Film Critics). It is a MUBI/Match Factory production.

Written & composed by Tom Wheatley
Feedback Synthesizer by Grundik Kasyansky
Bagpipes by Harry Górski-Brown
Percussion by Seijiro Murayama
Cello by Ute Kanngiesser
Saxophone by Jean-Luc Guionnet
Recorded by Matt Jaggar at Konk Studios, London
Additional mixing by Matt Jaggar and Tommaso Barbaro
Additional editing by Tommaso Barbaro
Mastered by Rashad Becker