The Ski Journal • Volume 15, Issue 3 • CHANGE OF APPROACH

Through years of organizing the right team and fighting to keep their film project alive, the cast and crew of The Approach have found common ground in the mountains. Ingrid Backstrom enjoys some fruits of that labor near Haines, AK. Photo: Taylor Boyd

My whole life I’ve thought I was drifting along to a plan unfolding, but I’ve made choices along the way, and each has led me to places—school, ski towns, freeskiing contests, professional skiing—where everyone else looks and acts and thinks mostly like me. When these choices and places are only available for some people, and those people are mostly all the same people, something isn’t right. Maybe it’s silly to think that a ski movie, or skiing or snowboarding in general, can have anything to do with changing this, but filmmaker and friend Anne Cleary and I wanted to do our best to try, and we had a feeling people were out there who felt the same way.

The concept for The Approach began in 2019, when Anne and I realized we could no longer wait for a film project that addressed our ideas of inclusivity in the outdoors; we needed to make it ourselves.

We started by carefully considering what we liked in ski movies (women) and what irked us about the prevailing point of view in shred films (machismo). I mean, we love bros and have been among ski bro culture as much as anyone, but could there be room for a different point of view? Could a film leave different tracks in the genre?

As we began stacking footage on powder days across the Pacific Northwest, Anne announced that we might be doing it all wrong.

“It’s not really doing anything differently if we just use mostly women in the movie,” she said. “It’s just repeating the same formula that’s been done before, but with similarly privileged people who happen to be female.”

She was correct. We wanted to bring in a more diverse cast of athletes, people who might not have had opportunities to film before and athletes who were doing things differently. We wanted established pros like snowboarder Leanne Pelosi, mentoring a fresh flock of women rippers in British Columbia, but we also wanted up-and-comers, people who represented, as Anne put it, “the mountain community we want to see.”

She reached out to Brooklyn Bell, a Black skier and professional mountain biker from Bellingham, WA. But Brooklyn said no—she wasn’t ready to film skiing yet.

Shortly after, COVID hit and we lost our main sponsor. I began to question everything. This was supposed to be a ski movie, something light and fun and entertaining, and yet here I was getting out of my lane, talking about privilege and who gets what in our country. It’s just skiing! How can you make it about all of this too? After months of personal reckoning, I realized that there’s no other way to think about it, that skiing is not exempt from the world around it. We knew Brooklyn and others had important stories to tell, but we realized we needed to do better to earn her trust as two white women with firm roots in an industry that had a pretty bad diversity track record.

In the fall of 2020, Brooklyn said no again—she wanted to ski more first—but she referred us to Emilé Zynobia in Jackson, WY who was a total shredder. Emilé took a chance on our project. A month later, we ran into Brooklyn at Mt. Baker Ski Area and invited her to join our party for the day. We weren’t filming, just hiking and shredding bouncy Northwest powder. By the end of the day, Brooklyn had decided to join us on a film trip to Jackson with Emilé. Over the course of the winter, these two powerful women—along with our mutual friend Vasu Sojitra—drew other friends into our orbit, such as photographer and filmer Sofia Jaramillo and sit-skier Anna Soens. We linked up with Baker local Sophia Rouches. The right people came together to support and challenge each other all winter, from Jackson to Baker—and all the way to Alaska.

Of course, the final result isn’t perfect; the best things never are. But I finally realized that was my mistake—focusing on trying to produce a perfect movie. Because it isn’t actually about the movie at all; it’s about the people who are out there riding, putting themselves out there and coming together in the mountains to write this new chapter.

The Ski Journal - Volume 15, Issue 3

CHANGE OF APPROACH

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