Skip to main content
Life is Climbing! film image; two men lean against camper van in desert

ACCESSfest: Life Is Climbing!

Free Event

This event has passed

Ready for a reminder of how incredible human beings can be? Born in Tokyo in 1968, Koba started climbing at the age of 16. At 28, he was diagnosed with an intractable eye disease called “pigmentary retinal degeneration” and slowly, inexorably, went totally blind. But this hasn’t stopped him from climbing. In 2006 he recorded his first victory in the International Paraclimbing Competition (Men Blind category), with his friend Naoya guiding him, shouting out instructions from the ground. Since then, he’s earned numerous world titles, including four consecutive gold medals in the IFSC Paraclimbing World Championships in 2014, 2016, 2018, and 2019. But Naoya has a dream: he wants to bring Koba out to Indian Creek, Utah, one of the most iconic climbing challenges in the world, and talk him up a twisty, spiral sandstone outcrop poised atop a precipitous cliff face…

An exhilarating, sometimes heartbreaking film about friendship, the gifts of adversity, and the courage it takes to put everything on the line for the thing you love, Life is Climbing! culminates in a breathtaking sequence you won’t soon forget.

Director

Sokichi Nakahara

Cast

Koichiro Kobayashi, Naoya Suzuki

Credits
Country of Origin

Japan

Year

2023

Language

In Japanese with English subtitles

19+
89 min

Book Tickets

This event has passed.

Credits

Cinematography

Sokichi Nakahara, Masataka Kiyono

Original Music

Chihei Hatakeyama

Also Playing

Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989

Dir. Göran Hugo Olsson
240 min

Drawing on 30 years of television archives, Göran Hugo Olsson relates the early history of the state of Israel, as reported by Swedish filmmakers, politicians and journalists. "An astonishing, invaluable document." William Mullally, The National

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

Frankenstein

Dir. Guillermo del Toro
149 min

Frankenstein and Guillermo del Toro might have been made for each other. The movie does not disappoint, a ripping yarn of grand adventure, spectacle, hubris, passion and XXL body parts, a tale of the fantastic that rings the imagination. Screening in 35mm.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

The Ballad of a Small Player

Dir. Edward Berger
105 min

Colin Farrell stars in this noir film about a gambler running out of luck in Macau, from the director of Conclave and All Quiet on the Western Front. Tilda Swinton, Fala Chen and Deannie Yip costar.

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

Woman in the Dunes (35mm)

Dir. Hiroshi Teshigahara
147 min

Teshigahara's collaboration with novelist Kōbō Abe's is vividly strange, erotic and unsettling allegory about an amateur entymologist who is himself ensnared in a trap he only dimly understands.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema