A screening for the documentary “Born to Fly” about former LSU and world champion pole vaulter Mondo Duplantis rise to fame will be held Saturday at the Acadiana Center for the Arts in Lafayette. Filmmaker Brennan Robideaux says he documented Duplantis journey for six years.
“There are a lot of practices. I traveled with him to something like nine or 10 countries throughout the process. So there’s some amazing competition footage that is there. And there’s also really great personal moments between him and his family, him and his father, the people around him.”
Robideaux reached out to then-17-year-old Duplantis after he broke the high school pole vaulting record while attending Lafayette High School.
Duplantis is from Lafayette but began receiving offers from the Swedish Athletics Association in 2015 to compete for the Scandinavian country. Robideaux says he’s always asked why Mondo wears the yellow and blue colors for Sweden and not red, white, and blue.
“I do think it’s important to see that even back home he was getting some backlash cause of his decision and I think most people had not really gone into enough details to think why this decision might be made. So it’s important for me to answer those questions in the film.”
The documentary was also nominated for the Jury Award for Best Documentary at the Austin Film Festival. The Louisiana premiere will take place at the New Orleans Film Festival this weekend.
Rodideaux says the goal now is to get the film distributed across the U-S.
“We’ve gotten some festival traction. People are taking an interest to it. Quite a few countries in Europe have picked it up. So now the big focus is America so that we can finally try to land that one. And everyone will finally be able to watch it.”
Duplantis currently holds the world record for pole vaulting at 20 feet five and a fourth inches.
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