Tom Wheatley – LUDOJ (PAN 166S1)

Giulio Bertelli’s AGON renders a unique view of competitive sport through a fictional Olympic Games, LUDOJ 2024. Winner of the FIPRESCI Prize (International Federation of Film Critics) the film is a triptych of three female athletes preparing for Olympic competition, that conjures a fiction via the techniques of documentary. Wheatley’s soundtrack is the exacting ear to its exacting eye, his score reflects the film’s hyper-focus on the gesture and interiority of sports performance, acting as punctuation, mirror, and an extension of Bertelli’s film that embeds further connections between its themes and intentions. 

Crucial for the soundtrack was a theme for the imagined Olympics, but LUDOJ is a non-place without nationality, and Olympic themes often take cue from national stereotypes. Wheatley’s LUDOJ jingle, and the sound bed in the cue LUDOJ (commentary) instead rendered a glassy flatness, reflective of the non-place in which the film happens, where we rarely see any identifying features of a landscape and instead see macro shots representative of the blinkered focus of the athletes, where we rarely see into any distance.  

Written & composed by Tom Wheatley
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