Skip to main content
The Mountain film image, director Thomas Salvador

The Mountain

La Montagne

This event has passed

North American Premiere

Pierre (writer-director Thomas Salvador) is a robotics engineer. After presenting at a sales conference in Chamonix, he calls in sick from work, buys climbing gear, and heads out into the Alps. It is a fateful, irrational turning point. Paris, work, family—these things no longer matter. The only thing that speaks to him is the mountain.

In recent years, we have seen several breathtaking climbing documentaries (Free Solo; Meru; The Summit). Like these, Salvador’s film has spectacular vistas, moments of vertiginous and claustrophobic intensity, and an obsessive protagonist, literally an outsider. But The Mountain is a reminder of how far dramatic fiction can go. A deep mystery opens up at the heart of this story, a fissure in the fabric of the real, and Salvador/Pierre plunges in after it with a zeal that will either inspire or infuriate, according to your taste for adventure. This is a simple film, but a remarkable one, that much is sure.

 

Cannes DF 2022 (best French film SACD)

 

Supported by

Director
Cast

Thomas Salvador, Louise Bourgoin, Martine Chevallier, Laurent Poitrenaux, Andranic Manet, Sylvain Frendo

Credits
Country of Origin

France

Year

2022

Language

In French with English subtitles

Film Contact
Links
18+
115 min
Award Winners Drama

Book Tickets

This event has passed.

Missing VIFF? Check out what's playing at the VIFF Centre

Let's Get Lost
Let's Get Lost film image; man holding trumpet leaning against a window

Let's Get Lost

Dir. Bruce Weber
120 min

One of the essential jazz films, this is an achingly tender record of jazz icon Chet Baker shortly before he died, still playing beautiful music and looking back on a life of might-have-beens. A love letter to a lost soul.

VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

Bird

Dir. Andrea Arnold
119 min

In Andrea Arnold's latest, 12-year-old Bailey (Nykiya Adams) lives in a squat near the English seaside. Neglected by her chaotic father (Barry Keoghan), she pursues an adventure with a magnetic stranger named Bird (Franz Rogowski).

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

All We Imagine as Light

Dir. Payal Kapadia
115 min

What Wong Kar-wai did for Hong Kong, Payal Kapadia does for Mumbai: the Cannes Grand Prix winner is a romantic heartbreaker about three nurses at different stages of life. It's a future classic.

VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

Never Look Away

Dir. Lucy Lawless
84 min

A piercing portrait of CNN combat camerawoman Margaret Moth, who fearlessly captured images from Desert Storm, Bosnia, Rwanda, Lebanon, and never backed down, even after a near fatal bullet to the head.

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

Ghost Cat Anzu

Dir. Yôko Kuno & Nobuhiro Yamashita
94 min

When fifth grader Karin is deposited with her grandfather for the summer she takes out her unhappiness on his giant talking cat, Anzu -- who looks out for her even so. This wildly original anime riffs on Spirited Away with pleasing irreverence. Rated: PG.

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre

Memoir of a Snail

Dir. Adam Elliot
94 min

A stellar Australian cast voice this charming and emotional animated feature by Adam Elliot, the tale of a lonely foster kid befriended by an eccentric elderly woman who turns her life around. (Not for kids!)

VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

Credits

Producer

Julie Salvador

Screenwriter

Thomas Salvador, Naila Guiguet

Cinematography

Alexis Kavyrchine

Editor

Mathilde Muyard

Original Music

Chloé Thevenin

Director

VIFF Logo

Thomas Salvador

Thomas Salvador is a filmmaker, screenwriter, and actor in his own films. He has directed six short films that have been selected and awarded by numerous festivals, including Petits Pas (2003), which was screened at Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight, and De Sortie (2005), which won the 2006 Jean Vigo Prize. While hosted at the Villa Medici in Rome, he wrote his first feature film Vincent (2015), which was selected by more than 40 festivals in France and abroad. The Mountain is his second feature film.

Filmography: Vincent (2015)