The Challenge

ating back 40 centuries, falconry is among the world’s oldest sports. Today it’s one of the more luxurious activities of rich sheikhs, who accompany their hawks by SUV or private jet. Purchased at auction for thousands of dollars, the falcons are led by their owners through artificial predation competitions. The film follows a falconer across the Arabian Gulf to an important competition, and explores the excesses of young Arab sheikhs who can afford to gold-plate their engines, drive around in luxury cars followed by trained leopards and take part in wild car races in the dust of the desert of Qatar. The Challenge, artist Yuri Ancarani’s first feature film, is like an incessant breath, full of long shots and fast-motion POV shots recorded by cameras on the hawks’ heads. The film, whose original soundtrack The Fades was composed by Lorenzo Senni and Francesco Fantini, gives space to the preparatory rites of falconers immortalized in amazing images of the unbounded desert, whose vast horizons and rocky hills stand out in intense ochre.