The Lappnor Project

The film that makes repetition gripping, which is the hardest thing a bouldering film can do. For four years Nalle Hukkataival returned to a single red granite boulder in a forest near Lappnor, Finland, and on October 23, 2016 he climbed Burden of Dreams, the first boulder proposed at V17. Adventure Sports TV's film documents the obsession.

This is for climbers who want to see what projecting at the absolute limit actually is: falling off the same move hundreds of times, in the same forest, session after session. It is also for anyone interested in doubt and aging as subjects, because Hukkataival talks about both, and about the fear of being defined by one unclimbed rock. Skip it if you need variety. Thirty-three minutes is one boulder and one person.

What works is the cameos. Jimmy Webb and Daniel Woods come, try, and leave humbled, and the film uses them to establish scale without a narrator. The routine of returning to the same block is treated with respect rather than cut for pace. What it gets wrong is that the send arrives without much sense of what changed. Four years of the same move and then it goes, and the film does not ask why that day.

3x 8C Flash in 2 Weeks is the counterweight: Adam Ondra spending one attempt on each of three 8C boulders. Lappnor is years for one problem. Together they are the two ends of what bouldering can be, and this is the harder end.