Climbing in Mount Poi

Of Choss and Lions follows Cedar Wright and Alex Honnold on an expedition presented in the film as a trip to Kenya to climb Mt. Poi; the catalog record for Mount Poi also lists the mountain as being in Italy, so the film’s expedition framing sits alongside differing location data in the record. The film, directed by Cedar Wright for The North Face, is shot and edited with the production values of a commercial expedition piece while still keeping the pair’s candid on‑the‑wall banter.

The account foregrounds how expedition big‑wall climbing often comes down to logistics, dust and nerves: the rock is described in the film as unreliable — hence the title — and the story mixes first‑ascent attempts, wildlife and the off‑route revelry that accompanies remote objectives. Watching Wright and Honnold together gives a clear sense of the personalities in play and of how an ambitious, partly unclimbed formation can become as much about uncertainty and improvisation as it is about technical moves.