The Barkley Marathons: The Race That Eats Its Young

A race is held every year in a park in Tennessee. Its rules are unusual: how to apply is secret, the entry fee is one dollar and a few odd items, the course is unmarked, map and compass are required, phones are forbidden. The runners have to find books hidden along the course and tear out the page matching their number. The limit is sixty hours. The man who runs it calls himself Lazarus Lake and designs the course so that it cannot be finished. In its first twenty five years only ten people finished. Timothy James Kane and Annika Iltis direct. The documentary dates from 2014. The idea for the race came from a real event: a prisoner who escaped from a nearby jail stayed days in the woods and covered very little ground; hearing this, the organiser thought he could do better. Its best side is the organiser himself; he does not explain the rules, mocks the runners and runs the race like a joke. The narrative does not present the run as heroism; most of those who enter drop out in the first loop and the film takes that as ordinary. The camera cannot get onto most of the course; the documentary accepts that and the narrative is built at the checkpoints. Its limit is technical; the image quality is poor and the sound is at times unclear. The race became far better known after the film and the number of applications rose. Who it is for: viewers who like endurance sport and documentaries about unusual communities. Who it is not for: the structure repeats, the technical quality is low, and there is little footage of the running.