Petzl RocTrip China 2011 - The official movie

A festival film with real ascents in it, which makes it the better of the two RocTrip movies on the site. From October 26 to 30, 2011, more than 600 climbers gathered in the Getu Valley and organizers developed over 250 new sport pitches. Guillaume Broust and Vlad Cellier direct, with photography from Julien Nadiras and Bertrand Delapierre.

This is for climbers interested in large-scale route development and in how elite climbers work new limestone. Dani Andrada's Corazón de Ensueño, eight pitches and 240 meters up the Great Arch at 8c, is the centerpiece: eleven days equipping, three working, then the whole thing without a fall. Gabriele Moroni's first ascent of Coup de Bambou at 9a on November 3 and Steph Bodet and Arnaud Petit on Lost in Translation, four pitches at 8a+, round it out. Skip it if you want one story. Twenty-three minutes splits between event footage and three separate climbs.

What works is Andrada's line. Climbing out of a cave through the arch is a setting nothing else on the site has, and the film shows the scale. What it gets wrong is that the event footage crowds the climbing, and a route that Honnold and Felipe Camargo would not repeat for five years deserves more of the runtime.

First Free Climb of Underground Big Wall in Macocha is the other cave big wall here, Adam Ondra in the Moravian Karst. Both are about steep rock in strange places. The Getu film has the bigger arch. The Macocha film has the better story.