Asgard Jamming

Sean Villanueva O'Driscoll directs and stars in this account of an expedition to Mount Asgard on Baffin Island, joined by Nicolas and Olivier Favresse, Stephane Hanssens and the Catalan big wall climber Silvia Vidal. The numbers do most of the talking: 45 days out, 600 kilometers covered on foot, 11 days of climbing on the wall itself. Asgard is the fortress of the gods in Norse myth, and the film leans into that joke without ever losing the reality of the approach, which is most of what the trip actually was. Walking that far to climb one wall is a specific kind of commitment. This is a classic of the Belgian expedition tradition, self-shot, unhurried, and full of music.