In "The Meaningless Pursuit of Snow", Patagonia takes us into the daily lives of five characters united by their passion for the backcountry.
They come from different backgrounds, are skiers or snowboarders and don't ride the same spots. What they all have in common, however, is a passion for skiing and powder, which they pursue every winter in the mountains of Europe, Japan and North America. Co-produced by Patagonia and Sweetgrass Productions, the film "The Meaningless Pursuit of Snow" (to be seen in full below) takes us inside the daily lives of these backcountry enthusiasts.
The 65-minute film features Frenchman Aurélien Routens and his partner Agathe Margheriti. The couple bought an old house in a remote village above La Grave. A way of life and a spot that inevitably resonate with the problems of the ski lift, planned on the same La Grave glacier and for which a collective supported by Patagonia is proposing a more environmentally-friendly alternative. For their part, Aurélien and Agathe strive to live as harmoniously as possible with nature in this sometimes difficult environment. They have renovated their house using recycled materials and selling the eggs from their 200 hens. This hard work has never stopped them from riding some of Europe's most spectacular mountains.
"Many beautiful things can happen in the mountains. It's also a wild place that can leave negative experiences. It's not us who accomplish these feats. It's the mountain that gives them to us," they explain. In the same spirit, we discover Vanessa Chavarriaga Posada, an undocumented Colombian immigrant who discovered backcountry skiing late in life, and Viki Fleckenstein Woodworth and her daughter Tasha, who practice the discipline together in the mountains of Vermont. Meanwhile, Melissa Gill and her partner Joe Lohr were united by a shared love of the mountains. But Joe died in an accident while hiking, and Melissa sets out to share his resilience and new-found joy in the backcountry. Finally, snowboarder Atsushi Gomyo now lives in his van, chasing snow across Japan with his friends.
"All of us behind the lens expended an unimaginable amount of calories in this quest for wild snow across the backcountry," explain the film's directors Michael James Brown, Nick Waggoner and Zac Ramras. "This inexhaustible pursuit of the useless is an obsession taken to extremes, mixed with a bit of curiosity. With the relentless question in the background: why do we do it? How is it that in the pursuit of something so futile, our lives and those of the five characters in this film have taken on so much meaning?"
