In Town of Runners, which premieres at the Tribeca Film Festival this week, director Jerry Rothwell travels to Bekoji, Ethiopia—a hotbed of world-class long-distance runners such as Tirunesh Dibaba and Kenenisa Bekele. How can so many top runners hail from one town, he wonders. Part of the credit goes to P.E. teacher-turned-running coach Sentayehu Eshetu, but it’s also the proximity to success: In a town as small as Bekoji, it’s easy to be one friend or family member removed from a childhood running idol. Rothwell explores the Bekoji phenomenon by following the paths of two aspiring runners. He spoke with Outside about the documentary, which was four years in the making.

What inspired you to direct Town of Runners?
The idea for the film came from the producer, Dan Demissie, who was doing a producing course at the film school where my production company, Met Film, is based. Dan comes from an Ethiopian family and was interested in doing a documentary about Ethiopian running. For me it was interesting because I’d grown up for some of my childhood in Kenya, so the Kenyan runners of the ’70s were my childhood heroes. I also had a daughter who was a really enthusiastic runner, so a combination of those things made it a subject I was really interested in exploring.

You started shooting during the Beijing Olympics, when two Bekoji runners won four gold medals. Can you describe the atmosphere at the time? Was everyone glued to the television?
We had a tiny bit of money to do our first bit of filming in Bekoji and we decided a good time to go would be during the Beijing Olympics, because we knew their runners would be running. So we gathered in what was at the time the only bar that really had satellite TV, and a lot of the village was gathered in that bar. Amazingly, [Bekoji natives Tirunesh] Dibaba and [Kenenisa] Bekele won two gold medals each. It was a sort of clean sweep of the long-distance track events, so there was an incredible sort of Olympics fever in the town. It was great because that scene starts the film and I think what it does is show the impact of those role models on the generation of young people from that town who’ve taken up running and see it as a way to a different life.

How did you first hear about Coach Sentayehu?
We were looking at making a film about running in the region, broadly, and as we did that research we realized that there was a lot happening in Bekoji. And when you looked into why that was happening, it came down to the figure of the town, Coach Sentayehu Eshetu, who was this genial man who’s been there for 30 years. He started off as a P.E. teacher and then when one of the kids who he’d initially trained at school, Derartu Tulu, became the first sub-Saharan African Olympic champion, he kind of realized that he could develop many more world-class athletes in Bekoji. And Durartu’s achievements really kind of kicked off what’s been 20 years of training people in that town.

He’s now trained a number of world-class runners in their early stages. Why do you think he has such a good track record?
I think he’s someone who’s able to build on the interest that comes from the role models, and someone who’s able to be rigorous about the way he trains people. He’s got a very strong work ethic, and that work ethic exists in Ethiopian society as a whole. In my experience [Ethiopians] believe you get places by working hard. I think that the fact that he’s able to build on those ambitions is what makes the town so successful. In another town down the road there isn’t the same kind of success, even though there’s the same environmental factors—high altitude and the same genetic pool. But there’s not a Coach Sentayehu.

It’s kind of amazing that in Bekoji, you could be one degree of separation from the Olympic athlete you idolize. Success seems that much more tangible.
Yes, exactly. I think they can sort of see how someone got to where they got to. They don’t only see the winning Olympic moment. They understand that that was Tirunesh down the road and that’s her mom who they see in the market every day. It becomes clear how they can progress from one place to another.

What are the running conditions like in Bekoji? Is there anything distinct about the environment that makes it ideal for training?
I think it’s an ideal place to train because there’s combinations of different terrains. There are steep hills that are ideally suited to doing repeated hill runs. There’s flat roads and a track. And, as everyone in Bekoji says, the air is good, I think by which they mean it’s clean, not polluted. It’s at a high altitude and the weather is cool. It’s the opposite of how one imagines Ethiopia as an arid place—it’s incredibly fertile and green and actually quite cold.

Many of the runners in Bekoji don’t wear shoes. Is that because they can’t afford them? I know in America, some people think running barefoot is better for you.
Yeah, people are running without shoes because trainers in Ethiopia are the same cost as trainers in the U.S. or the U.K. But obviously if you’ve got a wage that’s under a dollar a day, it’s gonna take a very long time to save up for a pair of trainers. So they tend to use trainers well past their sell-by date. Every time we went, we took secondhand trainers out—occasionally new trainers where we managed to get a sponsor. And those were really welcome. Trainers are kind of prized possessions there. For those that are into barefoot running today in the States, there is an issue in the sense that trainers do change your running style and do encourage you to sort of run on your heels—and are therefore even more prone to injury. And actually when you look at the running style of the girls, it’s a running style built on barefoot running.