Why Do So Many Climbing Films Feel the Same?

In the last few years, I’ve noticed that nearly every climbing film I watch feels pretty much the same—not in content, but in style. There’s an opening shot of the landscape. Music trickles in to set the mood. If we’re lucky, we’ll get a few seconds of uninterrupted climbing. But it’s not long before the incessant narration begins.

Today’s average climbing film—the kind you’d see in adventure film festivals—is a chronological, interview-driven documentary: in short, a spraydown. From the very first scene, the subject explains to viewers what’s happening, how they felt, and what it meant. Their voiceover carries into the climbing scenes, where we process their movement as an extension of the assertions they make. The movie, at its core, is a background visual to their report of what happened.

Interview voiceover isn’t a bad thing; it’s highly efficient for delivering loads of information. Info-dumping can be especially important for technical descriptions, such as explaining what it means to free climb El Capitan in a day. When it’s used effectively, not merely as a default tactic of climbing filmmakers, they tell one hell of a story. Even when it’s done in a template style, it can still be good; sometimes you just want to get the movie out there. To make a 10-minute movie, for example, an editor only needs the uncut send footage, a few falling shots, some lifestyle B-roll, and a two- to three-hour interview. Sometimes, the climbers are filming themselves with phones or GoPros; interview clips are the glue that holds together shoddy footage.

More and more, though, I’ve noticed that filmmakers are over-relying on subject narration to tell stories that can afford to feel like more than a trip report. In many climbing movies, interview clips aren’t saved for their most dramatic moments, but rather, used as a touchpoint any time a filmmaker worries that the audience isn’t being spoon-fed meaning aggressively enough. Many climbing filmmakers seem to be afraid of moments of silence, even those that may let the audience breathe, process, and make a prediction. There’s a constant urge to just get to the next climbing shot; to let the subject explain it. To let only the subject explain it.

With an interview-centric story, the burden of proof—that this story matters, that the subject’s experience was beautiful or harrowing, that they actually felt the way they’re saying they did—shifts from the director to the subject, who’s too busy giving a meticulous spraydown to worry about the more artistic elements of the film. They tell us they were feeling nervous, so we don’t need to see that they were biting their nails. The director doesn’t need to come up with a shot that shows, through body language or camera angles or light or sound or shot length or visual effects, that their world was closing in around them.

Let me be clear: It’s fine to hinge your movie on narration. I’ve been the over-narrator before, and trust me, I will again. It’s a popular style for a reason. But I wish that more climbing filmmakers, who had the time, aimed higher than just using action shots and B-roll as the background to a series of monologues. That once every few films, they didn’t just ask the audience to believe what they say, but took the time to show it.

Recently, I watched two short films that spoke a different creative language. They broke the template of the standard climbing film so well that watching them made me realize there was a template in the first place.

Passion, starring Jonathan Siegrist

The first was Passion, a film by Ryan White that starts off with a sarcastic dialogue between Jonathan Siegrist and his interviewer.

“I need you to break down the entire route,” says the interviewer, deadpan. “Every single move. And say that every other move is limit.”

Siegrist chuckles. “I’ll go over all the moves starting now.”

He never does—and that’s the point. The screen cuts to black. For the next 22 minutes, we only see Siegrist in action, climbing and power screaming on sport routes in France, Spain, and Nevada. There’s no narration, no exposition, and no subtitles.

But there is a story. Far from just letting the send footage play, White turns to art, speeding up abstract shots of natural elements like clouds, grass, and sunlight to characterize Siegrist’s efforts. The climbing unfolds to a soundtrack of high-pitched, indie-techno beats that betray an edge of anxiety over a glorious, organ-like synth. When music cuts to silence, it means something, just like when the grayscale filter snaps to color. White, who both directed and edited Passion, uses intentional editing to sharpen our attention to detail while building tension—a viewing experience that mirrors Siegrist’s focus while climbing.

“I wanted to make a film that felt like old skater films,” said Siegrist at the 2025 International Climbers’ Festival (ICF) in Lander, Wyoming, which screened Passion. “A climbing movie for climbers.”

The lack of voiceover is a gift. Instead of using the visuals as background to a monologue, White integrates abstract glimpses of supernatural forces to align the viewer with Siegrist’s intense experience. For example, at one fall, the screen cuts to a two-second spiral toward the ground from what felt like a skydiver’s GoPro. A microsecond later, we’re zooming out from some mountain to the rustling sound of rain. As the viewers, we feel panic, a loss of control. Then we see Seigrist back on the route, climbing again. At the next fall, we’re in the middle of the sky, flying sideways into a cliff with a jet sound, like something eternal is pushing us into a violent death. This time, we see the rain that we heard earlier, dripping into the grass. Siegrist breathes out, taping his finger. Thanks to the abstract clips, that finger-taping can carry both the threat of danger (the near-crash) and the gentle reassurance of a routine (the rain).

It’s wildly intense and then suddenly calm. It happens too fast to ask ourselves what it means. We’re right there with Siegrist; we’re not just being told what is happening, but experiencing it. Before we have the chance to put it into words, he’s back on another send go.

Passion is available on YouTube.

Muga, starring Ashima Shiraishi

In contrast to Passion, Muga does include voiceover narration and subtitles, right from the get-go. In fact, the film, which is directed by Alex F. Webb and Ashima Shiraishi, heavily relies on both. So what makes it so different from the average climbing film?

To start, it flips the usual relationship between climber and rock. As a child and teen celebrity in New York, Ashima Shiraishi was featured in dozens of video projects, from Reel Rock flicks to Glossier commercials to full-length biopics. Each video cast Shiraishi in the spotlight and framed the boulders as platforms to enhance and define Shiraishi’s achievements. By contrast, Muga presents the inverse: the boulders of Ticino are the focus, and Shiraishi is the side character who irradiates the stone’s remarkable life.

This choice of subject—Ticino rock, which Shiraishi tells us is alive—doesn’t fit in a human, chronological timeline, so Muga abandons it. All of Shiraishi’s voiceover descriptions (“I am grasping toward the zen ideal”) as well as the on-screen geological summaries (“Africa moves north, eventually colliding with Europe”) are in the present tense to collapse any sense of past or future. The film reinforces this flattening of time with visual metaphors laid out in side-by-side videos or blurred together in quick cuts. A camera pans down a glacier as Shiraishi’s finger traces a stripe of white in gray rock. Shiraishi, who uses they/them pronouns, falls from a round boulder as a pebble tumbles down a slab. On a two-panel screen, both stones are the same shape and size, challenging us to pick a perspective. Which one is enormous? Both? Neither?

Shiraishi’s monologues are not linear storytelling devices; they are abstract and lyrical, describing what climbing is and personifying the boulders as living beings on a geological timescale. But in avoiding concrete details about their climbing—where are they, what are they climbing, how are they feeling, how long was the project—they prompt the audience to dig for those details in the rest of the film, beyond the voiceover. The visuals are now potential clues; they become more significant, not less.

And they don’t give up answers easily. When Shiraishi reaches up for a hand hold, we watch them reach up for five different hand moves on five different boulders in ultra-fast cuts. Same for when they fall—we see several falls, all at once. The same clips are shown repeatedly to erase any direction in their cause and effect. Shiraishi turns a skull-sized rock in their hands; the camera zooms in to its texture, then cuts to mountains made of the same white and black crumpled folds. The effect of these cascading metaphors, laid out in time lapses, rumbling music, and even Shiraishi’s words, is to acclimate the reader to zooming in and out in time and space. Milliseconds to geological time scales and back again. Grains of sand to continental plates. By the end, it’s quite convincing that what’s happening on geological timelines is possibly more interesting than what’s happening in ours, if only because they are hidden.

A meditation on the hidden, extra-dimensional motion occurring in rocks hits harder coming from someone who once dominated the competition scene, which demands practicality. In 2019, the three-time Youth World Cup winner in both Lead and Boulder was 100 percent focused on qualifying for the 2020 Olympics—and, like many others, might have, if it weren’t for the unpopular format that included mandatory speed climbing. Now their motives for climbing are, arguably, more ambitious.

“I would often get overwhelmed,” says Shiraishi of the chaotic sounds of their competition years. “I obviously much prefer climbing to a symphony of birds or to the trees moving in the wind.”

The shift in direction from performance-focused films to meditative, abstract ones reflects Shiraishi’s own priorities. Today, the 24-year-old college student, who is on a break from classes in environmental studies, design, and media arts, says their chief interest is in collaborating with other artists to make more films like Muga.

At several climbing festivals, including the one where Muga premiered, Shiraishi teaches a beginner bouldering clinic that began with a meditation. Far from any cheering crowds, they ask us to pay attention to our breath, listen to the rushing river, and stare at a particular spot on the boulder in front of us: a practice they call Iwa-dō, or “the Path of Stone” in Japanese. At their urging, the questions featured in Muga reappear in practice. How did this stone get here?

On Shiraishi’s orders, I try to imagine how the boulder tumbling down the hill in front of me, millions of years ago. It’s dizzying, but eventually, I feel time slowing down.

Muga is available on YouTube.

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