TCFFHK26 - Film Review: Born to Fly (2026) - Hong Kong / Australia
Third Culture Film Festival, Hong Kong Showcase 2026 - Closing Film at Soho House, Hong Kong (28-30 August)
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critics Circle of Australia)
I rated it 8/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★
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A young man from Hong Kong, now living in Melbourne, decides in the same year he runs his first marathon that he will also become the fastest person ever to run the length of Sri Lanka. Six days, thirteen hours and twenty-two minutes later, Rahul Sharma has covered 566 kilometres from Point Pedro to Dondra Head. The documentary that follows him is called Born to Fly. The title comes from five seconds on the last morning, when his father says, “Son, tomorrow you will fly.” A friend later tells him he was born to do it. That is the whole film, really: a handful of stubborn friends deciding the thing is possible, then discovering what “possible” actually costs.
A movie is not about what it is about, but how it is about it. Born to Fly is about an ultra-run. It is how it is about three university students who had never organised an endurance event, never shot a feature documentary, and in the director’s case never even set foot in Sri Lanka while the cameras were rolling. Ali Khajeian directed remotely by WhatsApp. The footage is therefore uneven, sometimes beautiful, sometimes simply there because someone happened to be pointing a camera at the right moment of collapse. That roughness is the point. You are not watching a polished Red Bull special. You are watching three mates try not to drop the ball while one of them’s shoes are melting into his feet.
The heat on Day 2 is the sequence that stays with you. Sharma cannot remember most of it. His sock has fused to the skin. The film does not linger on the gore; it just lets you sit with the fact that he kept moving. Later, when the Achilles tendon turns traitor and he has to walk sixty kilometres, he makes a private deal with himself: this is the moment that separates the people who talk from the people who find out. The documentary is honest enough to show that the cause — Children’s Cancer Institute Australia — is both sincere and useful. Pain that would otherwise feel private becomes, in his mind, a smaller thing than what a parent in a hospital corridor is carrying. That comparison could have been mawkish. Here it feels like a man talking himself through the next kilometre.
Khajeian, who admits he has no particular interest in running, turns that distance into an advantage. The film is not made for other ultra-runners. It is made for anyone who has ever told themselves a slightly ridiculous story and then had to live inside it. The Sri Lankan locals waving flags, the last-minute logistical disasters, the three hours of sleep a night — none of it is dressed up as destiny. It is just what happened when real friends refused to treat inexperience as a veto.
At two hours it is a tad too long. A first film’s generosity with talking heads and a couple of montages that lean on the music start to feel like the run itself: admirable, but you begin to wish they would pick up the pace. Those are the two points I would take off. What remains is the rare documentary that makes you feel the weight of a decision rather than the highlight reel of its outcome. Sharma wanted to find out if he was as good as he said he was. The camera, imperfect and present, lets us watch him get the answer. Simply inspired for what they will do next. (Neo, 2026)