A Day at the Office
2026 · 49 min · Trad, Big Wall, Documentary · Xpedition Films
Sean Villanueva O'Driscoll, Vincent Flore and Tom Coosemans have been friends since childhood and now work in very different offices. They decide to leave all of them behind for a rafting expedition down the Nahanni River in northern Canada, aiming for the granite of the Lotus Flower Tower. Villanueva O'Driscoll directed it. The river is the point as much as the rock. Getting to a legendary wall by water rather than by trail turns the approach into the trip, and the film treats the paddling, the camps and the climbing as one continuous thing. A good watch if you like your big wall objectives wrapped inside a longer, stranger journey.
Review
The river is the point as much as the rock, and once you accept that the film works. Sean Villanueva O'Driscoll, Vincent Flore and Tom Coosemans, friends since childhood who now work in very different offices, leave all of them for a rafting expedition down the Nahanni River in northern Canada, aiming for the granite of the Lotus Flower Tower.
This is for people who like a big wall objective wrapped inside a longer trip. Getting to a famous wall by water turns the approach into the story, and Villanueva O'Driscoll's direction treats the paddling, the camps and the climbing as one continuous thing. It is also a good film about friendship between people whose lives diverged. Skip it if you want the Lotus Flower Tower itself. The wall arrives late and gets less time than the river.
What works is the premise of three old friends with one climber among them. Flore and Coosemans are not professionals, and the film is honest about what that means on a wall. What it gets wrong is proportion. Forty-nine minutes with the tower as the destination should give the tower more than it gets.
Venezuela Jungle Jam is the same director with a jungle approach instead of a river and a professional crew instead of childhood friends. That film is harder climbing. This one is the better story about why people go.
