Meru
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“Technology Has Come A Long Way”: Todd Douglas Miller And E. Chai Vasarhelyi On Going Big With Apollo 11 And Free Solo At IFP Week 2019
Documentaries have been making bank at the box office the last couple years, which is heartening for anyone worried the blockbusters are the only game in town. Still, you don’t necessarily have to see small, intimate fare like Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, RBG and Three Identical Strangers on a giant screen. You can’t say the same about Free Solo and Apollo 11. One finds cutting-edge cameras hanging alongside mountain climber Alex Honnold; the other unearths 65mm footage of the eponymous spaceflight. Both played IMAX theaters, and they were an even better fit on the world’s biggest screens than the […]
by Matt Prigge on Sep 17, 2019 -
Hits & Misses: How Seven Films from Sundance 2015 Performed
The health and identity of American independent cinema has always been difficult to gauge and define, but Sundance is our default arbiter and explainer. Of course, indie film exists far beyond the limits of Park City in January, but the festival gives the nebulous American indie sector a test sample — and as any scientist will tell you, that’s the first step in making an accurate hypothesis. So what can the films of Sundance 2015 clarify about the state of American indies, now and in the future? Some trends can be attributed to random cycles and one-time events, but there […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Jan 20, 2016 -
Cinematographers Jimmy Chin and Renan Ozturk on Shooting the Sundance-Winning Doc, Meru
Over a period of years, three climbers — Conrad Anker, Jimmy Chin, and Renan Ozturk — make repeated efforts to scale a 21,000 foot peak in Northern India, Mount Meru. Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi’s Meru is the chronicle of that quest, a story of not just mountain-climbing athleticism but also friendship and camaraderie. The winner of the U.S. Documentary Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival, Meru, strikingly, was lensed by two of the film’s three climbers, with one of them suffering severe injuries on the climb — an accident that is part of the film’s story. Below, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 13, 2015 -
“Dread, Trepidation, Anxiety and Misery”: Meru | Directors Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin
What fear — whether it’s personal, or one related to the development, financing, production or distribution of your film — did you have to confront and conquer in the making of your movie? Chai: Fear is one of the central themes in Meru. Dread, trepidation, anxiety and misery plague the subjects of the film throughout both 2008 and 2011 climbs; their physical fears of falling, starvation, frostbite or dropping the camera and the more psychological dimensions of fear like failure, risk, and the unknown, often quite literally not being aware of what’s beyond the next pitch. In the film, Jimmy describes the […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 23, 2015
