Altaitude

Synopsis

Everything is bigger in the Altai, the mountainous frontier between Mongolia, China, and Russia. This is what Damian and Dom discover there, skiing the high summits for three weeks and enduring early spring storms.

Opening up to the vastness, they must overcome their differences and learn to survive together, totally isolated at their high-altitude base camp, a tiny yurt in an expansive terrain of snow.

Objectives

We are living in an increasingly virtual world, in which everything has to happen faster and faster. I am convinced that outdoor sports can act as an antidote to this virtual space where young people today are often massively entrenched. And preferably not the craziness of extreme sports, where young people challenge each other and themselves, but an activity in which they open themselves to the silence and the rhythm of their footsteps or the sound of skis gliding over snow. In this way they discover their own inner music and who they really are and how they can start to become effective actors of change in today's world. The next step is meditation, unless no, this process might actually be meditation in itself.

Making movies is for me a way of sharing this vision with a larger public.

This movie is about my journey in the Altai highland solitude with the help of local herders and with just one colleague, the 19 year old Damien. Opening up to this isolation and vastness, we quickly become confused by the borderless white plains: « If you think it?ll take an hour, allow two. If you think it?ll take a day, allow two. » To survive together, jointly defying all risks, we had to readjust, conclude a pact and bridge our age differences.

With this movie, I want to share this incredible slow nomadic journey at the hearth of this magnificent Altai highlands that expanded our vision and made us enter in a space of meditation that really transformed both of us.