In ‘Unseen Olympiad,’ Director Casey Shaw Offers Unique, Sensory View Of Athletes In Competition – Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival

deadline.com:

For the Paris Olympics last summer, NBC Universal aired an astonishing 7,000 hours of coverage over the 19 days of the games.

Arguably lost in that barrage of coverage, however, was a sense of the athletes’ subjective experience of competition – their inner mental, emotional and physical landscape as they participated in this key moment of their young lives.

The impressionistic documentary Unseen Olympiad captures that missing element of the athletes’ sensory world as they strain to achieve peak performance in summer and winter sports – swimming, track and field, fencing, ski jumping, and more.

The film directed by Casey Shaw and produced by Shaw, Kelly Dawkins, and Miles Labat just held its world premiere at the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival in Greece (the country that, of course, hosted the first Olympic games in 776 BCE). “When we go to watch these events now there’s music playing almost constantly, like ‘pump up’ music.