On March 10th the Admiral Theater will host a special screening of “Running the Sahara,” a documentary that is as beautiful in its execution as it is jaw dropping in its subject. “Running the Sahara” follows the journey of three ultra runners as they attempt to run the breadth of the Sahara desert from the Atlantic to the Red Sea. By the time they are threading through Cairo’s chaotic traffic on the final leg of the expedition, the three men, Kevin Lin, Ray Zahab and Charlie Engle, had run close to 4,600 miles over the course of a hundred and eleven days. They had braved sand storms and heat that drove the ground temperature up to 140 degrees.

The shear audacity of their quest is such that at times director James Moll’s elegant cinematography is overwhelmed by the statistics on the subtitles (Day 39: Total Run 2,579K/ 1,603 miles). Distance runners are sure to thrill at numbers like these while the rest of us will secretly congratulate ourselves on our membership in the local bowling league (at least there is air conditioning and snacks).

James Moll weaves a captivating travelogue around the three runners. There are several beautiful shots where the grandeur of the desert is punctuated by the three small specks trudging across it. At other times, the runners stumble into scenes that have an otherworldly quality to them. In the vacant scrublands of eastern Mali, they come across a seven-year-old boy sitting alone with a baby goat. His parents had left him to wait while they went to collect water—a two-day journey.

The fact that the men are on foot allows for an intimacy with the countryside and its inhabitants that other modes of travel cannot match—something that Moll is quick to exploit. The resulting images can be poetic. The sand dunes in Niger suddenly give way to lush palms as the runners descend into the oasis at Fachi and dozens of laughing children mob them for an impromptu parade. At other times the visuals are startling and unvarnished. The poverty at its worst is bleak. The beach in Senegal, where the run began, is littered with garbage to a degree Seattleites would find hard to imagine.

But in the end, the film keeps coming back to this impossible struggle between the human body and distance. As Ray Zahab says early in the film, “For me ultra running is ninety percent mental and the other ten percent is mental.” As the jouney wears on, the men wear down and exhaustion strips them to the bones of their character. “Running the Sahara” becomes a gripping psychological study of men caught in a daily collision between their obsession to finish and heartbreaking fatigue. But it is here that Moll becomes tenuous in his direction. He is reluctant to move in closely to the inner and interpersonal struggles the runners face. As a result the viewer misses out. What pulled these men across a continent happened as much in their heads as in their legs. We get hints—confessional snippets—but not the kind of crisp insight that would have made this good film great.

“Running the Sahara” will be at the Admiral Theater for one night only on March 10th.
The film will show at 6:30 PM followed by a question and answer session with Charlie Engle, the expedition’s organizer.

Tickets can be purchased at the Admiral or online at www.nehst.com (click “box office” on the site menu). For more background on the film and the runners’ experiences listen to an audio interview with Charlie Engle at the link above. Please be advised it is a large file (14 mb) and may take time to download.