Amanda Reiter’s back is towards us, her voiceover narrating her experience while competing for the Bavarian Marathon Championships. She won silver, a placement she accepted until she saw that the championship entered a phantom contestant. She protested it and the championship mailed her the gold, robbing her of an award ceremony. One can think of a factor why the championship doctored their way out of giving her the gold. But her identity as a transwoman probably factored in, a humiliation that she and all women face. This is just one of the stories viewers see in Julia Fuhr Mann’s Life is Not a Competition, But I’m Winning.

This documentary reminds its viewers of the purpose of the ancient Olympics and its modern iteration, 1896 onwards. It’s to celebrate male athleticism, unfairly gatekeeping the bodies and the voices of women and those ‘in between’. Life is…, then, attempts to give women and non binary athletes their voices back through voiceover narration. It also tries to do it by showing athletes of Reiter’s generation and younger in seemingly organic discussions. These discussions happen in places like the Berlin Olympic Stadium, which exists because of a big historical loser. There, they discuss perceptions of gender and what others say about them in and out of the arenas.

Life is… has good intentions but I feel like it goes half and half with its storytelling. Amanda Reiter gets a lot of voiceover time to tell her story about her experience with the Bavarian Marathon. I feel the opposite of how it handles the segments about Annet Negesa, a cis female Ugandan athlete. Negesa’s story, or at least the sliver of it that it shows, will traumatise a lot of viewers. She went through all of that just because she produces more testosterone naturally than average cis women. But the documentary shows more of her training sessions than actually letting her tell her full story. At least the documentary colours her shot well but the Soderbergh filter on other scenes is distracting.

Negesa’s inclusion in Life is… is part of its good intentions, same goes for the discussion scenes, as one of the ‘panellists’ has their head on another’s lap like they’re all friends hanging out. One of them, is of course, talking about a sports injury that makes her less ‘ideal for marriage’. It’s nice to see athletes across the gender spectrum find levity despite physical and social humiliation. The rest of their discussions, though, feel like a bunch of undergrads deconstructing something that others already deconstructed. The documentary’s pitch about the victors winning history is also an old concept so why argue against it?

Stream Life is Not a Competition, But I’m Winning on MUBI.