2013 COMMITMENT GRANT WINNERS

The six winning 2013 grantees are:

Sara Dosa and Josh Penn: The Last Season
The Last Season (formerly Roots & Webs) tells the story of the relationship between Roger, an American Vietnam vet and recovering alcoholic, and Kouy, a Cambodian refugee who survived the Khmer Rouge. Reeling in the wake of the profound violence of war, both men find common ground in the unlikely world of Oregon’s woodland mushroom hunting camps.

Dominic Gill: Rise
Few cities boast better urban climbing than Rio de Janeiro. From the heart of the city's beaches, eclectic culture and sprawling favelas (slums), massive granite monoliths host world-class rock climbing. This natural adventure resource was the motivation for a unique climbing outreach program for at-risk youth in Rio's favelas, the Centro de Escalada Urbana, an ambitious climbing school started in 2010. Rise will introduce the adventure world to a new sort of climbing film, one centered around kids striving to understand achievement and how it can make a difference in their lives.

David Hanson: Who Owns Water
There’s a lot at stake on a few, big, slow, brown rivers in the deep South. The Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint (ACF) Basin is becoming the canary in the coal mine for a looming East Coast water crisis. The Hanson brothers grew up in Atlanta beside the Chattahoochee River. In March 2013, they returned and paddled, together and separately, the 542 miles of the ACF Basin from its source in the Appalachian Mountains to the Gulf of Mexico, telling the story of an endangered and essential water resource.

David Osit: Long Year Begin
On a remote Arctic island, a lone door juts out of the icy landscape. It marks the entrance to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a facility built to preserve samples of every crop on Earth in case of global catastrophe. Constructed deep inside a permafrost mountain, the vault is a second home to Cary Fowler, a redheaded biodiversity specialist with a soft Tennessean drawl who is determined to secure a future for Earth beyond his generation. Combining carefully composed images, observational footage and articulate interviews, Long Year Begin is a poetic meditation on humanity’s perpetual quest for ecological and self-preservation in the face of natural and man-made threats.

John Waller: Mending the Line
Mending the Line is the story of 90-year-old World War II veteran, conservationist and fly-fishing legend Frank Moore. After landing on Utah Beach, Normandy, in 1944, the young fisherman and newly married soldier pushed into occupied France and onward toward Luxembourg and Germany. During the war, he caught a glimpse of freshly caught salmon hanging in the window of a restaurant that inspired a dream he harbored his entire life: to return in peace and fish that same river. Sixty-nine years later, at the end of May 2013, Frank traveled to France with Uncage the Soul Productions (Treeverse, Mountainfilm 2012; and Into Darkness, 2011), his wife Jeanne and their son Frankie to fulfill that dream.

Nathan Ward and Samuel Bricker: The Rider and The Wolf
The Rider and The Wolf tells the story of Mountain Bike Hall of Fame cyclist Mike Rust who went missing without a trace in 2009. The film celebrates Rust’s life as a Colorado bicycle pioneer and delves into his disappearance in the San Luis Valley—an almost lawless part of Colorado’s Wild West—examining innovation, tradition, independence, irreverence, body hunting and what it’s like for a tight Irish family to lose a brother.