Patagonia

Patagonia is the Ventura-based American outdoor apparel company founded in 1973 that has also become a recurring producer and backer of feature and short climbing films. Their work tends to sit at the intersection of environmental and social concern and clean climbing cinematography: crews who know how to shoot movement on rock while also giving room to context, history, and the people around a route.

The four films here show that range. Rotpunkt follows Alex Megos as he confronts routes that refuse to yield quickly and situates his work within the Frankenjura tradition that coined the term rotpunkt; it’s as much about learning to fail as it is about onsighting and projection. Rotpunkt: Bibliographie compresses weeks of effort at Céüse into a tight portrait of projecting a 9c-scale testpiece, emphasizing skin management, repetition, and the small arithmetic of linking moves. On a different axis, Stone Locals: Rediscovering the Soul of Climbing trades grades for portraits, profiling people who steward places and keep climbing communities together, including a Yosemite couple living out of a van. Finally, In Sequence: Katie Lamb and the Craft of Hard Bouldering documents the rehearsal-like precision behind modern hard bouldering and follows Lamb’s work on Box Therapy (V16) while showing how a full-time job and elite climbing can coexist.

Together these films demonstrate Patagonia’s interest in humane, place-aware narratives: technical climbing footage is present, but so are conversations about value, stewardship, and how routes sit inside communities and histories.