Mastering the Stawamus Chief is the challenge in one of the films at the Whistler Film Festival.
A film called Vertically Challenged will be screened at the festival. It's about a quadriplegic man named Brad Zdanivsky.
"He's attempting to be the first quadriplegic to climb the face of the Stawamus Chief," said Shayne Gusdal, the director of the film. "This was his first attempt at a full climb, and he doesn't make it."
The film follows Brad's attempts and struggles, but focuses on his character rather than his failure to succeed.
"It's more about him instead of the climb," Gusdal said. "The next one will be about the mountain, the challenge."
"I tried to make it a story about Brad, to get to know Brad."
Zdanivsky, who Gusdal described as a sort of robotic systems engineer, has been working with his father and several other climbers to design and build a rig to make it possible for quadriplegics to rock climb.
Zdanivsky also needed another rig, similar to a wheelbarrow stretcher, so he could be carried to the where he needed to start climbing the Chief. And he had to rely on other people to get him there.
"He's got no control," Gusdal said. "It's a pretty trusting endeavor."
Gusdal did much of the filming from the ground around June 21, the weekend of the summer solstice. There were also two cameramen on the rock face, and one with Zdanivsky.
Zdanivsky, a climber from Prince George, wanted to climb he Chief before he had the accident that left him a quadriplegic.
"It's been a driving force for him to do this," Gusdal said.
Gusdal, who is not much of a climber himself, can still appreciate the local landmark.
"I think it's a really cool piece of rock," he said. "It's very photogenic. Can't snowboard on it though," he joked.
The Chief comes off well in one particular shot, where Gusdal does time-elapsed shots of the light and shadows changing on the face of it.
Vertically Challenged plays Dec. 3 at 7 p.m. at Village 8 Cinema.
And it's not the only Squamish connection to the fourth annual film festival, which has 93 films playing Dec. 2 to Dec. 5, 60 per cent of which are Canadian films.
A local cinematographer worked on the set of Crazy Canucks, which is opening the festival on Dec. 2 at 7:30 p.m. at the Whistler Convention Centre.
Crazy Canucks is about the Canadian Men's Alpine Team from the 1970s. The team, made up of skiers Ken Read, Steve Podborski, Dave Irwin and David Murray, was notorious for its kamikaze tactics in the European ski scene.
Christian Begin was on site in Austria in February 2004 filming action scenes for the movie. He was part of the second unit, along with Beat Steiner.
"We worked to film all the action for all the skiing for the film," Begin said.
"It was really cool to be in Austria working on it with Canadian people."
Begin has experience filming ski movies. He filmed a movie called Ski Bum for the National Film Board of Canada, to name one.
But the movie about the alpine ski team is a special one.
"It was pretty amazing because we kind of grew up with those guys," he said. "They were the most known Canadian skiers ever.
"When you're young you're kind of look up to them."
He said the actors in the movie look like their characters, and the director, Randy Bradshaw, stuck to the story.
"It's a really honest Canadian story," Begin said.
The film is based loosely on the book White Circus by Ken Read.
