Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel’s Mister Universo is a twisting, rolling great big ball of fun of a movie.

However, audiences looking for a more straightforward narrative in this story of a lion tamer on the lookout for the first black Mister Universe, (played, respectively, by a lion tamer and the first black Mister Universe). It’s a documentation that cannot quite be classified as a documentary but still feels as though we are capturing the action at its most natural.

Despite this movement towards an understanding of pure cinema, the film itself can certainly be classified as a difficult feature to truly experience—that is, until the end of the film, in which a truly inspired sequence seems to come out of nowhere, (it has very little to do with the preceding narrative and involves a sort of performance art which seems at odds with the very limitations of the human body).

While the focus may be on the circus as a dying art form, the future of cinema as art is also questioned throughout.

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