A 17-minute fever dream where art eats its own tail and hisses back.
Life imitates art when Julien Goethe directs an unhinged version of An Athlete Wrestling A Python.
Direction
Stephanie Jane Day weaponizes the short format
Acting
Josephine Starte's unhinged filmmaker energy
Editing
Collapses time like a python crushing prey
Director
Stephanie Jane Day
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
The title references Frederic Leighton's 1877 sculpture, but Day inverts the classical heroism—the 'athlete' here is filmmaking itself, and the python is the artist's own ego.
Day shot this in her actual family home; the Goethe house's claustrophobic corridors are authentic to her childhood geography of dysfunction.
US
