Screened as part of NZIFF 2017

Mountain 2017

Directed by Jennifer Peedom Big Nights

A spectacular musical and cinematic collaboration, Jennifer Peedom’s new movie exalts the spellbinding force of the world’s great mountains – and the power they exercise over the human imagination.

74 minutes CinemaScope / DCP

Rent

Director

Producers

Jennifer Peedom
,
Jo-anne McGowan

Screenplay

Robert Macfarlane
,
Jennifer Peedom

Photography

Renan Ozturk

Editors

Christian Gazal
,
Scott Gray

Music

Richard Tognetti
,
the Australian Chamber Orchestra

Narrator

Willem Dafoe

Festivals

Sydney 2017

Australian filmmaker Jennifer Peedom follows her extraordinary Sherpa with a giant-screen celebration of the allure of the mountains, created in collaboration with the Australian Chamber Orchestra. Spectacular images, shot in 21 countries by legendary mountaineer/cinematographer Renan Ozturk (Meru, Sherpa) and others, have been cut together thematically to an orchestral score drawing on Chopin, Grieg, Vivaldi, Beethoven and new works by Richard Tognetti. The orchestra will perform live when the film tours Australia in August, but we’re delighted to have secured big-screen engagements for the soundtracked version.

Drawing from Robert Macfarlane’s book Mountain, read on the soundtrack by Willem Dafoe, the film considers the changes in humanity’s relationship to mountains over recent times. Not so long ago they represented the divine and mysterious; to many indigenous communities living on their flanks they always will. By the time Hillary and Tenzing ascended Everest, mountains had been colonised by the west and filled our imaginations as personal challenges to be overcome.

That spirit of conquest may be hard to separate from the risks taken to capture the exultant top-of-the-world imagery that makes this film such an exhilarating experience. As Peedom offers us a jaw-dropping montage of people throwing themselves off precipices for the sheer thrill of it, her film revels both in the dramatic grandeur of the mountains and in the glorious irrationality which may be the only sane human response.