Now In Post-Production
"Dragon's Summit"
Written In late 2016 this will be my third fiction short. Filmed in the high mountains of Evritania, Greece
Photo By Clodagh Treacy
A film about love and the mountain.
This film will take the audience through an emotional journey of love in the face of adversity. Most have experienced the feeling of an unlikely emotional connection with someone they could never be with because of distance, circumstance, intervening relationships. Dragon’s Summit takes that concept and asks: What if you could make it work… in the mountains, far away from social contexts?
Why make an adventure film?
Take leap of faith, into the mountain range, down gorges, on top of the world. What drives us out there? it’s not only the scenery. We go there to risk, to exchange life with experience to dwell in the unexpected. Up there, goals are easily defined: We climb to the highest point, we trek to the sacred waterfall, to the mythical cave. We strive to survive the windy night.
Thematic Influences
On Romanticized Nature
There have been very few adventure movies that actually capture the wild in a non-romanticised way. Nature, although beautiful at times, does not strive to speak to us, as we derive meaning from it’s parts. In other words Nature is Indifferent. Our protagonist goes though this fallacy. At first he is mesmerized by the mountain and its beauty and ultimately he is betrayed by that notion.
The closest example of such romantic characters can be found in the cinema of Wes Anderson. (Moonrise Kingdom, The Royal Tenembaums, The Grand Budapest Hotel)
The Climb or The Human Vs Nature Movie
Most of the great climbing movies have been documentaries or fictionalised accounts of actual adventures. Recent examples include “The Revenant” (dir A. Inarritu), Into the Wild (dir Sean Penn) and Wild (dir Jean-Marc Vallée).
The most significant documentary on climbing and it’s emotional context is probably the 1998 IMAX documentary “EVEREST” by David Breashears (and it’s 2015 Feature Film adaptation)