With The Challenge Yuri Ancarani allows us to attend a "strange weekend in the desert." Following in the footsteps of a falconer accompanying his competition birds to a major tournament in Qatar, the film reveals the intact prestige that falconry has retained in contemporary Arab culture. Rich in forty centuries of history in the West and the East, this practice is shown to us as a world of its own, in all its "madness," with its architecture, its traditions, and its sporting codes.

The result of three years of preparation and shooting, The Challenge is a "bigger-than-life" and meditative film about the contemporary, the relationship between humans and animals and the place of the desert in our culture.