The sixth DVD in the box set contains 3 shorts that are completely different from one another, and they are: “Big Stone, Linea Continua and Cold.
Of these three, clearly not all of them could be films of excellence, although the three films do converge on the idea of continuity. A climbing project, regardless of the summit you reach, is a journey, and this journey is the real goal. The summit becomes just the normal conclusion of a route, of a project and why not... of a life choice.
As in the case of the Barmasse family, where the project is no longer even thought out but lived, from generation to generation. Or as in the case of Cory Richards, who asks himself... but what am I doing here...
They are three apparently different films, but they lead us by the hand through the sometimes invisible nuances of the “mountain choice”; the most beautiful and moving is without doubt Cold, which in all its drama seems to touch us to the core, all of a sudden.
From the back cover:
COLD - In the last 26 years 16 expeditions have attempted and failed winter ascents of Pakistan's 8000ers. On 2 February 2011, Simone Moro, Denis Urubko and Cory Richards were the first after this long period. The journey nearly killed them. Cory took a small camera with him and filmed the constant hardship. This is their story, seen through the raw and honest perspective of Cory's lens.
BIG STONE - Reticent Wall: the most demanding aid route on El Capitan in Yosemite Valley is one of the hardest of all. A5, the grade on the aid-climbing scale. It is the world of steady nerves that Valerio Folco tells us about in this film. The world of great modern aid climbing, of big walls, of the strangest contraptions and of using your imagination to attach yourself to the rock, hoping that “the thingy” you are hanging from holds just long enough to let you move up to the next micro-edge or invisible little pocket.
LINEA CONTINUA - Four generations, one single “intent”: to roam the mountains in search of adventure, of the new! This is the Barmasse family of Valtournenche; mountain folk, mountaineers, explorers and mountain guides of the Cervino (Matterhorn). And it is precisely on the “Gran Becca”, as the people of the Aosta Valley call the Cervino, that on 17 March 2010, a generation apart, father and son rope up together to try to climb the couloir which, from the Enjambée, plunges 1200 m towards the foot of the south face of the Cervino. An old project attempted 24 years earlier by the father, Marco, and now taken up again by the son, Hervé.