Acclaimed visual artists Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno transform spectacular footage of French soccer star Zinédine Zidane – recorded by multiple cameras during a match between Real Madrid and Villareal – into an innovative film closer to visual art than sports documentary.

Over the course of one, 90-minute match at the Santiago Bernabeu stadium in Madrid during a regular la Liga championship game, Gordon and Parreno capture Zidane up-close using 17 cameras supervised by cinematographer Darius Khondji (Se7en, Delicatessen) to track Zidane's every gesture, move and glance.

As opposed to the traditional broadcast of a game, these synchronised cameras (combining different film formats, from super 35mm to High Definition and including the first commercial use of two Panavision HD cameras with specially modified zooms) are positioned around the stadium at the level of the spectators, all focused on Zidane.

It's a real time portrait of a great sportsman in action that also turns the star player into an objet d'art. In view of the background of the makers – Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno are video artists and not sports reporters – this is no surprise: they are pursuing a portrait tradition from classical painting. There is no analysis of play, there are no interviews.

Adding to this sensory experience is the blending of the roar of 80,000 strong voices in the stadium with a subtle and menacing score by Scottish band Mogwai. The result is a gloriously rigorous experiment with cinematic form and an arresting study of a sports icon.

Director Douglas Gordon is one of the most acclaimed British artists of our time. Through his work in video, photography, and sculpture, Gordon addresses and explores universal dualities: life and death, good and evil. Since his first solo show in 1986, he has exhibited extensively, including the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands; the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Centro Cultrual de Belém in Portugal, and the DIA Center for the Arts in New York. A 2001 retrospective organized by the Geffen Contemporary in Los Angeles traveled to the Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada; the Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City; and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.. In 2006, his work was the subject of exhibitions appearing at the Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland; and the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Trento, Italy. Gordon was the 1996 recipient of Britain's Turner Prize, in 1997 was awarded Premio 2000 at the Venice Biennial, and in 1998 he was presented with the Hugo Boss Prize at the Guggenheim Museum in SoHo. He was also included in the SkulpturProjekte in Münster in 1997.

Director Philippe Parreno is an internationally acclaimed French artist whose work explores the different ways in which subjectivity moulds our experience of the real. Embracing a variety of media from the traditional (drawing, sculpture) to the more experimental (animation, ventriloquism, performance), Parreno consistently debunks the idea of a singular, authentic reality, instead exploring a number of different - but equally valid perceptions of it. Parreno recently had major shows at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco and the Kunstverein Münich. His work is included in the major collections of the Museum of Modern Art New York (MOMA), the Walker Art Center (USA), the Centre Georges Pompidou (France), the Paris Museum of Modern Art (France), the Guggenheim Museum New York (USA), the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco and the Museum of the 21st Century (Japan).