On a rainy evening just before the holidays, a select group of members of the media, and friends and family of the first U.S. Olympic climber Brooke Raboutou, were invited to the premiere of “The Wall – Climb For Gold” at the exclusive Explorer’s Club on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
The new feature length documentary, produced by Windfall Films with the support of adidas, chronicles the journeys of Brooke Raboutou (USA), Janja Garnbret (Slovenia), Miho Nonaka (Japan) and Shauna Coxsey (Great Britain) as they trained toward the ultimate goal of representing their countries for the first ever climbing events at the Tokyo Olympics. The star of the night was Brooke herself, who was in attendance to field questions on her training, the hardships brought on by the pandemic, and being born into a family of climbing royalty.
Brooke was the first climbing athlete from the USA to qualify for the games, and one of youngest competitors at the 2020 Olympics, balancing a rigorous training schedule with being a full time student at UC San Diego. It is clear from the film that Brooke’s talents and ambition are products of the environment she group up in. Both her parents are former World Cup champions (Robyn Erbesfield-Raboutou and Didier Raboutou). Her mother was breaking barriers for women in the sport well before Brooke was born and clearly has not slowed down much. As such, Brooke’s upbringing centered around a passion for the outdoors, and a gift for climbing from a very early age. By the time she was 7 she broke her first world record, and she did so again at the age of 11.
Watching the strength shown by Brooke and her peers as they struggled through the already difficult path to the Olympics, made even more so by the onset of Covid-19, was an emotional journey. As they battled both mentally and physically en route to the games, the film reveals
an astonishing and inspiring insight into what it means to be an Olympian, and ultimately what it means to be human.
“The Wall – Climb for Gold” was created by Windfall Adventures Ltd, a subsidiary of Windfall Films. The film is executive produced by Dan Kendall and directed by Nick Hardie. It features a score by multi-award winning composer Nainita Desai and is edited by Emily West. It is set for a global release early this year across all digital platforms.
