Cycling Movies: In cycling, captains are nothing without their helpers. Exactly these are in the documentation Wonderful Loses: A different world in focus.
The documentary can currently be found on YouTube and Vimeo can be purchased.
Wonderful Loses: A different world
They are the unsung heroes that hardly anyone knows. Day after day and year after year they work for their leaders. They themselves will probably never have the pleasure of crossing the finish line jubilantly. Nevertheless, they can always motivate themselves. Still, they don't stop training hard in the winter. And yet they always get back up after every painful fall. They're not the stars. They are the unsung heroes of cycling. We call them water carriers, helpers and domestics. This is exactly what the Lithuanian director Arūnas Matelis has in the documentary Wonderful Loses: A different world dedicated.
The helpers are the heroes
Arūnas Matelis accompanied three classic helpers and the medical team of the Giro d'Italia with a camera team for several years. At the 91st Academy Awards, the film was even submitted as a Lithuanian entry for best foreign language film, but was not nominated. Nevertheless, the 71-minute documentary was showered with numerous prizes. Perhaps this passionate documentary succeeded because Arūnas Matelis wanted to become a professional cyclist himself, but ended up failing early on due to an injury. He didn't get so far that he was allowed to work as a helper for his captains. So he looks in Wonderful Loss not looking down on Daniele Colli, Svein Tuft and Paolo Tiralongo, but looking up at them. He thus succeeds in delivering a message that we should generally accept in our society.
Olivier Haralambon in L'Equipe:
“This is more than a documentary about professional cyclists. It is an aesthetic pearl, the queen of gems, elevating cycling to the heights of martyrdom.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6rSazU_EbA&t=