The Protagonist is a feature documentary about a former world champion boxer — and about what the belts cost him. Shot over ten years, the film begins in earnest when he loses his titles, and follows the seven years he spends trying to win them back: legitimately one fight from a title shot, again and again, undone each time by his own body — a snapped Achilles, a bicep torn twice, a rotator cuff, a cut above the eye on the eve of the fight. It is a film about redemption, and about learning that all that glitters isn’t gold.

Dael Poulter shot the film alone throughout. Its ending is the fighter’s only seated interview — filmed with an Interrotron, Errol Morris’s device for looking a subject straight down the lens — in which, for the first time, he says out loud what the chase cost him.

The film was completed in full: test-screened, 5.1 mixed at Air Studios, graded, and selected for distribution by Dogwoof — made with executive producers André Singer and Richard Melman, editors Henrik Sikstrom and Pablo D’Ambrosi, and an original score by Baba Adefuye and Thomas Farnon.

Enquiries: studio@daelpoulter.com