2026 | Czech Republic
8’
DoP: Filip Smil
director: Luboš Rezler

Ring of Giants is a film essay inspired by James Hibbard’s book The Art of Cycling, which views cycling not as a sport but as a way of experiencing the world.

The film follows cyclist David Krňanský over the course of a single day on a 233-kilometer journey across the iconic peaks of the Italian Dolomites, with an elevation gain of 6,879 meters. His true feat of endurance is accompanied by a mysterious narrator—a sort of prophet standing outside of time and space—who, through Hibbard’s texts, opens up the film’s philosophical dimension.

Documentary reality, theatrical performance, and poetic images of inner experience gradually intertwine in a meditation on movement, pain, and the present moment—the moment when the boundaries between the individual, the surroundings, and the landscape begin to dissolve.