Feature documentary · In development
A 90-minute feature documentary — fighting the biggest health crisis sport has ever faced.
A feature documentary by Dylan Taylor
Produced by AS Cinema · Lausanne
Password — Concussion_2025
The film
At 20, doctors tell him the damage is permanent. His six-year fight to recover exposes a crisis threatening the very future of sport — and the new science that could save it.
Time is running out
Synopsis
In 2020, Dylan Taylor is twenty. He plays rugby. He has his whole life ahead of him. One collision. Unremarkable, on the face of it. The kind of contact players absorb dozens of times a season. But something doesn't come back. Days pass. Then weeks. Then months. The headaches settle in. The migraines sharpen. The dizziness never leaves him. He can no longer read. No longer sleep. No longer think clearly. The doctors he sees — in Switzerland, across Europe, in North America — all reach the same verdict, cold and final: “The damage is permanent. Learn to live with it.” Dylan Taylor is twenty years old. He has just been told his life is over.
But Dylan refuses that verdict. For six years he searches, experiments, meets specialists, and immerses himself in the lives of former athletes severely diminished by concussion, of their families, and of the doctors developing new approaches. What he finds unsettles a widely held certainty: the lasting effects of concussion may not be inevitable after all.
Tackling Concussion follows Dylan as he takes his life back, while uncovering a global crisis to which sport, medicine and society are still searching for answers.
“The damage is permanent.
Switzerland. Then Europe. Then North America. The same sentence, in every language.
Learn to live with it.”Reading · Sleep · Balance · Memory · The future
Beyond one game
Every sport
The film opens in rugby because that is where Dylan was hurt. It does not stay there. The same impact, the same missed diagnosis and the same silence run through every contact sport — and through the schools and Sunday leagues where nobody is watching at all.
Why now
21 August 2026
High Court, London
The court allowed the group action against World Rugby, the RFU, the Welsh Rugby Union and the Rugby Football League to proceed. The claimants say the bodies that ran their sport failed to protect them from concussive and sub-concussive blows.
25 August 2026
The BMJ · Boston University
Researchers examined the deaths of 1,712 former NFL players. Of the 338 who donated their brains, 93% had chronic traumatic encephalopathy. In the general population it is under 1%.
This film does not arrive near the story. It arrives on top of it.
The scale
3.5×
the rate of death from neurodegenerative disease among former professional footballers
NEJM · 7,676 players
7 in 10
US emergency-room visits for sport-related brain injury are children aged 17 and under
CDC
No.1
cycling causes more sport brain-injury ER visits than any other activity in the US
CDC MMWR
27%
of adults surveyed report a concussion in their lifetime
US national survey
50–69M
people worldwide sustain a traumatic brain injury every year
CENTER-TBI
$400BN
estimated global economic cost of traumatic brain injury, every year
CENTER-TBI
In sports played under identical rules, women are concussed more often than men — and diagnosed later.
The difference
Lived from the inside — not reported from the outside
The science arrives the way it arrived for Dylan: in scanners, in clinics, in failed treatments. The audience doesn't watch an investigation. It undergoes a recovery. It is an immersive documentary written like fiction.
Incisive access
High-profile athletes with shocking stories, the leading concussion experts in the world, and the controversial governing bodies behind sport. Pre-established. Ready to go.
Science that already exists — and almost nobody can reach
Effective protocols are being built right now, in fragments, across a dozen institutions. Dylan spent six years and everything he had assembling them himself. The film is the first to put them in one place.
From doom to hope
For the first time, concussion changes from a story of doom into one of hope.
Story arc
Act 1
In 2020, Dylan Taylor is twenty years old, with his whole life ahead of him. One collision, unremarkable at the time. But something doesn't come back. Migraines, dizziness, the inability to read, to sleep, to think. The doctors he sees all reach the same verdict: “The damage is permanent. Learn to live with it.” Rugby, his studies, his relationships, his future: everything collapses. His mother wants to protect him; he still wants to believe he can come back.
Act 2
With medicine at a dead end, Dylan looks elsewhere. He meets former athletes severely diminished by the game, their families, specialists developing new approaches. Each encounter widens the film: what looked like a personal tragedy turns out to be a global public health crisis — and the science unfolds on screen while he is being treated, never apart from it.
Act 3
There is no miracle cure, and Dylan learns that the hard way. But he finds treatment protocols, turns his own experience into knowledge others can use, and pushes to change how this injury is handled. Recovery is no longer only his own goal; it becomes a mission. The film closes on an open question: between sport and medicine, the conflict is not resolved — and that is precisely why it has to be looked at head-on.
Intention
Tackling Concussion uncovers the dark cost of sports — but it does not exist to condemn. It tears down and exposes these problems so that it can find the answers and fix them.
It is a story of recovery and hope. One man's terrible journey used to help others, and to find a way to protect the sports we all love.
On location — a preparatory interview being filmed.
Watch the trailer
vimeo.com/1159684001Password — Concussion_2025
Trailer assembled from preparatory interviews and archive footage, made to feed the writing of the film.
Told through
Camera
A raw camera, close to Dylan's body and to his experience, alternates with precise, elegant interviews. The picture stays where he is, not where an observer would stand.
Image
Animation, medical imagery, blur, sound ruptures and silences translate what concussion provokes internally: disorientation, fatigue, vertigo, isolation, loss of control.
Sound
Sound plays a central role: muffled stadiums, internal heartbeats, tinnitus, breathing, and silences that arrive where they should not.
Key characters
The protagonist
Dylan Taylor is a promising young rugby player with big dreams. But he is also an unknown — not famous, not influential; someone with an ordinary family and ordinary friends, someone you could know. He is about to fulfil his dream of professional rugby when a concussion forces him into retirement.
As his life collapses, he is torn between the urge to play again and blaming the sport for what happened. Finally, he realises the problem is bigger than him and rugby — and that he can act.
Against all odds, with little more than tenacity and passion, this young man overcomes an impossible fight, reaches a greater goal — helping others in difficulty and saving the sport — and changes forever the way the world sees concussion.
The mother
Dylan's mother, who feels guilty for letting her son play rugby and suffers alongside his injury. She stands against Dylan, urging him to move on and to give up hope of ever returning to the game.
Casting portrait to come
Supporting characters
The familiar face
Rugby · France
Former French rugby international, forced to end his career by concussion. His testimony opens the film to the reality of professional sport: behind the stadiums and the titles, damaged bodies, affected families, lives to rebuild.
The warning
Rugby · England
A former player marked by years of rugby, Jamie embodies the film's darkest horizon: lasting brain damage, early dementia, institutional abandonment. For Dylan, he is both an intimate fear and the face of what could happen to so many others.
Beyond rugby
Ice hockey · Switzerland
A former professional ice-hockey player in Switzerland, Eric takes the subject beyond rugby: concussion cuts across the whole of sport and can durably upend health, family life, careers and the sense of self.
Supporting characters
The recovery
Rugby · England
A former Saracens professional who lived for years with persistent symptoms and medical wandering, Matt's journey shows that a path to recovery exists once the right care finally arrives.
The science
Concussion specialist · Canada
A leading concussion specialist who has spent more than a decade gathering and translating the most advanced research, guiding thousands of patients and practitioners. In the film, he is one of the central medical voices — turning complex science into concrete paths to recovery.
The clinic
Cognitive FX · United States
Co-founder and clinical director of Cognitive FX, clinical neuropsychologist and specialist in brain trauma. For over ten years she has treated patients from around the world with persistent post-concussion symptoms, placing concussion in a global public-health perspective.
Dylan Taylor
The subject, the patient and the director are the same person. Dylan Taylor is not a journalist or a doctor examining this from a distance. He was the patient for six years; he did the research, knocked on every door, tested every treatment in his own body. A promising young player at the time of his injury, he is also an unknown — someone with an ordinary family and ordinary friends, someone every viewer could know.
That position gives the film what no production can buy: six years of lived access to clinics, specialists, changing rooms and families; a camera already inside the story; and a first-person narration whose honesty could never be reconstructed.
Today, his experience is feeding concrete work: a treatment protocol currently in development with CHUV Lausanne and the Swiss Olympic Committee.
6 years
of filmed access, before a commission
3
continents, already travelled
12+
clinics and institutions, doors already open
Technical information
90 min
Feature documentary
UHD 4K
Premium delivery
EN + FR
Original languages
2027
Target delivery
The team
Producer
Born in 1980 in Pazarcık, Turkey, of Kurdish origin, Ali Sinaci immigrated to Switzerland in 1989. A self-taught filmmaker, he founded AS CINEMA in Lausanne in 2014. His productions include Le Scarabée d'Or (2015), Doosra — Keertigan Sivakumar's internationally awarded short — Vous n'êtes pas Ivan Gallatin (2022) by Pablo Martin Torrado, selected for the Swiss Film Award, and the international coproduction Théa & Fritz: Les Amants de Metropolis (Canal+, 2026).
Director
A British author and director based in Switzerland. At 20, a concussion suffered in a rugby match ended a promising career and plunged him into years of suffering ignored by the medical establishment. Refusing to give up, he undertook a long journey of research and recovery that led him to the world's leading specialists. He now devotes his energy to raising global awareness of concussion through Tackling Concussion — a story he carries in the first person, with a legitimacy no one else can claim.
Director of photography
Born in 1964, Swiss and American, BFA in Film from New York University (1987). Director and cinematographer across narrative, documentary and commercial work, including Spartiates (Solothurn Prize) by Nicolas Wadimoff, Les Dames (Locarno), La Mif (Best Film Namur, Génération Berlin) by Fred Baillif, Bisons by Pierre Monnard and Vous n'êtes pas Ivan Gallatin. Member of the Swiss Cinematographers Society (SCS).