It’s the season for ski films. There is no better time to chat about films, both ski and climbing related, than with one of the directors of “The Alpinist,” Nick Rosen.
After a weekend day in the high alpine, where puffies, a biting wind, and turning leaves teased of winter, we’re more in tune with the season—which is ski film season. The socials are beginning to buzz with the sending as production houses ramp up the visual and auditory volume. Now. Is. The. Time. To. Get. Stoked.
With that in mind, we took a small detour to visit one of the best in the climbing/adventure film business, Nick Rosen of the Reel Rock Tour and Sender Films. Rosen and his colleagues reliably shoot, edit, and produce often tense, funny, and heavy films with crisp storytelling and vertigo-inducing visuals. If you are intrigued and new to the Sender Films’ catalog, “The Alpinist,” an Emmy Award winning film, is a beautiful place to begin your journey.
On this podcast, you’ll find a few F-bombs and such. Really, there are far fewer F-bombs than on our skintrack banter sessions, where we discussed the spectrum of adventure films and why this podcast host should not be such a crank regarding modern stoke-focused ski films. Point taken.
Rosen knows his craft and practices it like a master. The end product of Reel Rock’s and Sender’s efforts—their fine human-centered films—are gifts to the rest of us.
This is to say that Rosen and the host discuss ski films in the context of the broader adventure film realm.
Nick Rosen Head of Creative at Reel Rock and a Partner at Sender Films. Photo: Reel Rock
You can find us at the-high-route.com. Yeah, there are two hyphens for redundancy, which is a good policy in the mountains. For weight weenies, hyphens weigh next to nothing.
The theme music for The High Route Podcast comes from Storms in the Hill Country and the album The Self Transforming (Thank you, Jens Langsjoen). You can find a link to the album here—there are so many good songs on this album. And if you think you’ve spotted a UFO in the past or visited the 7th dimension, “Beautiful Alien” is a good tune to start with.
Jason, I think I have some similar preferences in viewing to you: I want to see a complete story.
However, I do think there are plenty of ski films that bring this.
Like you mentioned, Nikolai Schirmer turns the pure ‘freeride shred’ YouTube video into a story with human characters and a journey.
And Cody Townsends ‘The Fifty’, is exactly that traditional hero Odyssee that Nick mentions.
And what about ‘This Mountain Life’, with Tania and Martina Halik?
And yes that movie about Jess Kimura was great, but that really doesn’t fall into ‘ski movie’ so much any more. I watched that the same way I watched the series about Michael Jordan: the personal story is what it is all about, not the specific experience out there doing the sport.
Damn. Great call. I haven’t seen the film (This Mountain Life) since the release. I’ll be cuing that up Friday evening. And it reminds me to start working on a story about a similar mega-traverse from Vancouver to Ak back in (I think) 2001. And as a list builds, seems like a worthy list to curate on the site: solid ski films with a heavy bent towards the fine tuned narrative arc.