Darkest Before Dawn: A Dawn Wall Story

Alex Eggermont's film covers Siebe Vanhee's first season on the Dawn Wall, El Capitan's hardest big wall, with Séb Berthe alongside him. It is a portrait of the early part of a project, the season where the route is still mostly an unknown quantity and the work is learning what it will actually demand. The filmmaking leans toward the physical rather than the narrative: hands on nothing holds, a body hanging thousands of feet up, the fingertip mechanics of climbing at that grade. Nineteen minutes, closer to a mood piece than a chronicle. Worth watching if you want the feel of being on that wall more than a blow-by-blow account of pitches.