SYNOPSIS

A Black athlete arrives in Berlin, 1936. As he walks toward the Olympic stadium, hostile slurs and racist slogans line the streets. We assume they belong to the Nazi past—until we realize every insult is a real tweet, written in 2019.

This is the conceptual engine of Heroes of Today – Jesse Owens, a film that collapses time to expose the enduring violence of racism. Rather than reenactment, the work operates as a temporal palimpsest, using the mythic figure of Jesse Owens not to historicize struggle, but to underscore its continuity.

Shot in crisp, high-contrast black and white, the image is strikingly contemporary—eschewing period fetishism or archival mimicry. The minimal visual language, built from a restrained sequence of meticulously composed shots, lends the film a sculptural quality. The narrative unfolds with gravity and silence: Owens, alone, walks. The tension accumulates not through dialogue or montage, but through what enters the frame—inscriptions on walls, signs in windows, expressions from silent onlookers.

One by one, these texts reveal themselves to be present-day social media posts—verbatim racist tweets targeting Black athletes. This gesture of superimposition ruptures the illusion of historical distance. The stadium is not just in 1936 Berlin—it is wherever Black excellence is met with systemic hostility.

Despite its brevity and formal restraint, the film delivers an outsized impact. The power lies in its simplicity, its refusal to dramatize pain, and its unwavering focus on a single Black figure moving through a world that refuses to welcome him. The final result is a film that reads like a quiet scream: unresolved, accusatory, and necessary.

Critically acclaimed for its concept and execution, Heroes of Today – Jesse Owens stands as a resonant indictment of the present disguised as the past—a meditation on repetition, remembrance, and resistance.