ORBAYU [full movie] a climbing Odyssey with Nina Caprez and Cédric Lachat

A climbing document that reads as an exploration of the mental side of one route, and the best Petzl film on the site. Orbayu is 500 meters and 13 pitches up the north face of the Naranjo de Bulnes in the Picos de Europa, with a crux around 8c+ low on the route and sustained, exposed limestone above. Iker and Eneko Pou freed it in 2009. In spring 2014 Nina Caprez and Cédric Lachat try to repeat it, and the film follows what happens.

This is for climbers who want to see the balance of psyche and team decisions on a route this long and this committed. Lachat completes it. Caprez climbs every pitch free but not in one continuous push, and the film treats that outcome as the real subject rather than a footnote. Skip it if you want a clean send. Mathieu Rivoire and Julien Nadiras made a film about doubt, and it holds that line.

What works is the sound and the mist. The route is named for the fine, persistent fog that settles on the face, and the film lets it in. What it gets wrong is that twenty-seven minutes with two climbers of this caliber could have said more about how their partnership handled one of them finishing and one not.

Swissway to Heaven is Lachat and Caprez in their own country, with Lachat again the lead subject. Orbayu is the film where Caprez has the harder story, and the one I would show anyone who thinks a climbing film needs a send to work.