This Mountain Life

2019 • 77 minutes

About this movie

The awe that mountainous landscapes evoke is universal, yet even in a place that is 75% mountains, few people venture into true wilderness. Martina Halik and her 60-year-old mother Tania attempt a bitterly cold 2300km ski trek from Vancouver to Alaska through the treacherous Coast Mountains; a journey that has been completed only once before, and never by a female duo. Their adventure is interspersed with unheard stories of high-altitude human endurance and passion: a group of nuns inhabiting a mountain retreat to be closer to God, a photographer who is later buried in an avalanche, an impassioned alpinist, a focused snow artist, a couple who have been living off grid in the mountains for nearly 50 years. What is it that leads these adventurous people to sacrifice everything – comfort, family, personal safety – for a life in the mountains? Shot in cinematic detail, This Mountain Life is a riveting and intimate portrait of human passion set high in the peaks of BC, Canada.