Bannister: Everest on the Track
A documentary about athletics legend Roger Bannister who came through World War II inspired to do something great for the United Kingdom. Following the lead of Edmund Hillary conquering Everest, Bannister made history on May 6, when he broke the four-minute mile at Iffley Road track in Oxford.
This film is as much an historical study of Britain's psychological, if not almost physical, need for something - anything - to erase the woes of World War II as it is a fresh look at the quest for the first sub-4:00 mile, the heretofore deemed physically impossible. Before the war, Britain had bloomed best in its Sporting Tradition, but the amateur accolades leading to Olympic accomplishments were blown off the podiums in the 1952 Helsinki Games. Roger Bannister was the epitome of that disappearing scholar-athlete ideal. Can the lunchtime-trained runner immersed in his medical school studies inject the booster shot into Britain's flagging but still flickering morale?
The Gesture
A stirring documentary about a seminal moment in the history of sports and social justice – the gesture made by American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. At a time of upheaval in the United States, Smith and Carlos risked their careers to take a stand for equal rights as they stood on the medal rostrum for their national anthem, a salute which would change the course of their lives and be remembered as one of the most powerful statements ever made in a sporting arena.