The North Face presents: ALPHANE

A North Face–backed film that follows a small team of climbers returning to Switzerland to establish and chase cutting-edge boulder first ascents. The central thread is Shawn Raboutou’s work on Alphane, shown in the edit as V17 and described in the source material as the first proposed 9a boulder in Switzerland and only the fourth such proposal worldwide. The film interleaves that project with other high-end problems — Trip to the moon (V14), Mystic River (V15), Squalo Bianco (V14), Fight Club (V14) and Dreamtime (V15) — and a short segment on a River Arête project. Ben Neilson filmed the piece; the roster includes Matty Hong, Jimmy Webb, Daniel Woods, Felipe Carmago, Giuliano Cameroni and Shawn Raboutou. The film matters as a record of bouldering at the upper end of the scale in Swiss rock: it shows projection work, sequence-reading and the on-the-rock adjustments that precede proposed grade milestones. For climbers interested in contemporary standards and in how elite boulderers approach problems, the edit collects attempts and finished ascents across a range of V14–V17 tests and preserves Shawn Raboutou’s Alphane ascent as a documented moment in the development of extreme bouldering grades.