EXCLUSIVE: Thunderous applause may greet one documentary premiering at the Venice Film Festival, fitting for a story of athletes who shake the earth with every footfall.

Sumo: Spirit Weighs Nothing, directed by Erik Shirai, goes inside the ring and the training room with champions of the traditional Japanese sport and aspirants hoping one day to achieve the top ranks. Perhaps no film has ever provided such an intimate view into the physical and mental demands of sumo, and how deeply it reflects Japanese values and culture.

We have your exclusive first look at the documentary in the clip below. The film from ESPN’s 30 For 30 premieres Wednesday night in Venice.

The filmmaker, who’s from a Japanese American family, became familiar with sumo as a child.

“I grew up always having it around,” Shirai recalls. “If I went to my grandmother’s house, it would just be on in the background… It was always playing on TV.”

But it wasn’t until the documentary project came about in 2019 that Shirai truly immersed himself in the sport. He would soon discover how punishing it is – not only the brutally difficult training regimen, but the violence of the contact when two sumo wrestlers hurl themselves at each other

“If you ever go see sumo at a training session, the first thing you’ll notice is the sound, that you’ve never heard or you rarely hear, which is like a bone-crushing kind of body slam, like flesh on flesh,” Shirai tells Deadline. “Because when they collide, often their forehead hits. So, you hear the almost head-to-head collision, like a thump… If you can imagine two animals with horns colliding… it makes you just look away at first if you’re not used to it and you’re just going, ‘Oh, that can’t be good.’”

He continues, “A lot of them obviously have concussions and everybody does this thing [in training] where they bang their heads against each other or on a big piece of wood to create a callus on their forehead… It’s just crazy.”

Part of a sumo’s training involves massive calorie consumption to become as sizable as possible and thus very hard to move in the ring. (Konishiki, the American-born sumo who reached the second highest rank in the sport, topped out at a weight of 633 lbs. or 287 kg). The object of the sport is to push or toss an opponent out of the ring or get them to touch a body part, other than the feet, to the floor first.

“You build your body in a certain way that makes it more difficult for opponents to do that. And the challenge is that building yourself to become this huge 200- 300-kilo guy, I think that’s the biggest thing,” Shirai observes. “I don’t think that most foreigners understand that, how difficult that is.”

Surprisingly, though, the film shows sumo has no weight categories.

“You can be fighting someone that can be two, three times bigger than you,” Shirai notes. “And I think that’s what makes the human spirit become so much more prominent.”

Among the competitors documented in the film is 15-year-old Kosei, who tips the scales at a mere 154 lbs. (70 kg). Remarkably, he can hold his own against giants.

“He has to be able to use other tactics,” says Shirai, “be quick and swift and find other ways to use his agility and speed and his frame to work against bigger opponents.”

Shirai takes a striking visual approach with his film, shooting it in lustrous light and kind of sepia tones.

“I wanted to make it feel sort of nostalgic and timeless,” he explains. “Sumo’s been around for thousands of years, but yet very little has changed while the rest of the world has extraordinarily changed. So, I kind of wanted to make a film that felt like it was sort of frozen in time.”

The sport, to the outsider, may seem quaint or perhaps embarrassing in that competitors wear very little when they wrestle.

“You’re basically half naked, you have to wear these loin cloths,” Shirai points out. “I don’t think anybody would think of sumo as a physically appealing thing — or most people wouldn’t, maybe. But if you actually watched them and if you went to a training session, you would see how incredibly athletic they are.”

Looks, Shirai affirms, can be deceiving. “The misconception is that [people] think sumo is for fat people – ‘They built a sport for fat people’ — but it’s quite the opposite… They’re more athletic than I think most football players are… [NFL great] Micah Parsons went over to a [sumo] stable and he couldn’t push this little, small junior wrestler even an inch.”

He adds, “I think that [people] more and more are realizing if you get past the physical look of it, you realize that these are true athletes that have built their bodies in such a way that allows them to fight.”

For many top American athletes, boastfulness is de rigueur.  That’s anathema in sumo and Japanese culture generally.

“I felt growing up, there was this huge misconception about Asian culture — maybe it’s exotified or maybe it’s misinterpreted,” Shirai observes. “Often what’s misinterpreted about Japanese is the respect and tradition and what it means to be reserved and restrained, which is so the opposite of Americans. I feel Americans in general are like, ‘I’m the best, I’m the greatest, no one can beat me.’ It’s about trash talking. It’s all about that. It’s got to be out on the surface, and everybody needs to know that you’re the best. And it’s quite the opposite with Japanese. That was something that I wanted to [show] in this film, using sumo… this sort of physical stigma, this idea that the way something looks is not what it actually is.”

Shirai says it’s about it’s about “what true strength means, which is something often you can’t see with your eyes.”

After Venice, Sumo: Spirit Weighs Nothing will play at other film festivals (the director wasn’t at liberty to disclose which ones). The film will premiere on ESPN in 2027. It’s produced by Carolyn Hepburn for ESPN/Disney; Teddy Leifer and Sam Stanley for Rise Films; Sigrid Dyekjaer for Real Lava, and Yusuke Kamata for Generation 11.

The clip below gives a good sense of the ins and outs of sumo competition, and the stunning visual appeal of the documentary.

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