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Altaitude

Everything is bigger in the Altai, the mountainous frontier between Mongolia, China, and Russia. This is what Damian and Dom discover there, skiing the high summits for three weeks and enduring early spring storms.

Opening up to the vastness, they must overcome their differences and learn to survive together, totally isolated at their high-altitude base camp, a tiny yurt in an expansive terrain of snow.

Once liberated from the modern electronic appendages, the 19 year old Damien immediately enters into resonance with the Altai Mountains of the Tavan Bogd, the Five Saints. He is the one opening the door to the sacred dimension of the place and to the interaction that its inhabitants nurture with them.

More info on altaitude.com

French dialogues subtitled in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, German, Russian, Italian, Czech, French.

Version with Embedded English subtitles available.

DCP version available

  • Dominique Snyers
    Director
    The Nahanni Whisperer
  • Sabine Hubeaux
    Video Editor
  • Dominique Snyers
    Video Editor
  • Pierre Bruyns, Blue Nuit Studio
    Sound Editor
  • The Shore by Coline & Toitoine
    Music
  • Meditation 1, Grandi Spazi, Canzone Moderna, Natura Long, Temple by Marco Rosano
    Music
  • Reflection by Antoine Jorissen
    Music
  • Project Title (Original Language):
    Altaïtude
  • Project Type:
    Documentary
  • Runtime:
    26 minutes
  • Completion Date:
    July 31, 2018
  • Production Budget:
    25,000 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    Belgium
  • Country of Filming:
    Mongolia
  • Shooting Format:
    4K
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Dutch Mountain Film Festival
    aachen
    Germany
    November 7, 2018
  • 2019 Grand Jury Foreign Film Award, Mountain Film Festival
    Mammoth, CA
    United States
    2019 Grand Jury Award in category Foreign Films
  • 2019 Official selection, Travel Film Festival, Moscow
    Moscow
    Russian Federation
    2019 Official Selection
  • 2018 Adventure Shorts Film Festival
  • 2018 Offcial Selection, Explore Images, Nice, France
    Nice
    France
    November 9, 2018
    2018 Official Selection
Director Biography - Dominique Snyers

Dom studied engineering in Belgium and at the Stanford University in California. He holds a ph’D in computer science from the Caen University in France. In addition to working as University teacher, entrepreneur and creator of IT start-ups, he has participated throughout his life in numerous wilderness adventures in both horizontal and vertical environments.

He set up the non profit association capexpe.org, a community of adventurers. Cap Expe encourages us all to dream of an adventure and realize it esasily and inexpensively. Rather than buying an ‘all inclusive’ prefabricated adventure, including the photos to be published on Facebook, the Cap Expe community empowers novice adventurers to come up with their own plan and execute a trip themselves.

His main motivation has always been teaching and knowledge transfer. That is also why he is now fully diving into film realisation to try finding answers to the following question: "Why in our modern society, that is everyday becoming more and more virtual and is openly rejecting any risky behavior, do we see more and more people engaging in hazardous adventures to reconnect with the wilderness and with themselves? »

First he co-organised and took part in paraplegic Arthur’s Alaskan adventure portrayed in the film entitled “Le Pouvoir des Rêves” [The Power of Dreams]. More recently, his film "The Nahanni Whisperer" (thenahanniwhisperer.com) recounts his packraft journey on the Nahanni river in the Northern Territories in Canada to climb the Lotus Flower Tower with four other friends.

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Director Statement

We are living in an increasingly virtual world, in which everything has to happen faster and faster. I am convinced that outdoor sports can act as an antidote to this virtual space where young people today are often massively entrenched. And preferably not the craziness of extreme sports, where young people challenge each other and themselves, but an activity in which they open themselves to the silence and the rhythm of their footsteps or the sound of skis gliding over snow. In this way they discover their own inner music and who they really are and how they can start to become effective actors of change in today's world. The next step is meditation, unless no, this process might actually be meditation in itself.

Making movies is for me a way of sharing this vision with a larger public.

This movie is about my journey in the Altai highland solitude with the help of local herders and with just one colleague, the 19 year old Damien. Opening up to this isolation and vastness, we quickly become confused by the borderless white plains: « If you think it’ll take an hour, allow two. If you think it’ll take a day, allow two. » To survive together, jointly defying all risks, we had to readjust, conclude a pact and bridge our age differences.

With this movie, I want to share this incredible slow nomadic journey at the hearth of this magnificent Altai highlands that expanded our vision and made us enter in a space of meditation that really transformed both of us.

For other films see www. thenahanniwhisperer.com and flolopapys.com