Micah Berman and Isabelle La Motte have combined their interests in skiing and the environment to create a new film Last Tracks, which they will screen tonight at Kimball Union Academy in Meriden.
The two University of Vermont graduates (Berman in 2015 and La Motte in 2016) and club team skiers were inspired to make “a ski movie that was about more than just skiing” by internships at T-Bar, a film company based in Richmond, Vt., Berman said in a phone interview this week. As interns, they helped with a film about small ski areas, United We Ski, he said.
Berman, a Meriden native and 2011 Lebanon High School graduate, holds a bachelor’s degree in environmental science and La Motte’s degree is in environmental studies. Together, they decided the time was right to make a movie about skiing’s impacts on the environment and climate change’s effects on skiing, he said.
“Seeing the winters of the last 10 years or so, it’s really changed quite a bit,” Berman said of the region’s snow cover.
Such changes are particularly noticeable to back-country skiers, who don’t ski on groomed trails, he said. While resorts can blow snow to cover gaps, back-country skiing depends on natural precipitation.
“(It would be a) bummer if we lost skiing due to climate change,” he said. “Skiing is so much more than just a sport, it’s a lifestyle.”
Berman skied for Lebanon High School in both downhill and cross-country. He earned the New Hampshire Interscholastic Athletic Association’s Skimeister award for best overall performance in downhill and cross-country skiing and in ski jumping at the state championships in his senior year.
The film follows Will Spiro, a classmate of La Motte’s at UVM, who tries to understand how different facets of the ski industry — resort skiing, back-country skiing and snowboarding — are affected by climate change.
The other skiers in the film are also UVM friends and acquaintances, Berman said. The narration is voiced by Allan Reetz, a family friend of Berman’s who is the director of communications for the Hanover Consumer Cooperative Society.
The young filmmakers enjoy taking footage of their friends on the slopes in their free time, Berman said. They used material they collected during the 2014-15 ski season including “shots of crappy snow in Burlington” to create a trailer.
Then, through Kickstarter they raised about $5,000 to help cover the cost of equipment, travel and music rights.
They worked to put together an outline and script for the film in the fall of 2015, filmed most of it last winter and edited it over the summer. They whittled down 15 to 20 hours of raw footage to a film of 36 minutes in an editing process, which they estimate took 330 hours.
They shot the film in several locations around the Twin States: Sugarbush in Warren, Vt., Stowe Mountain Resort, around Bolton Valley Resort and Tuckerman Ravine on Mount Washington in the White Mountains. They also include footage from Alta Ski Area in Utah.
In addition to chronicling Spiro’s journey through several styles of skiing, the film also includes interviews with experts, including Michael Snyder, commissioner of Vermont’s Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation; Janae Pritchett, owner of Colorado Backcountry, and Maura Olivos, sustainability coordinator and ecologist at Alta Ski Area and Alta Environmental Center.
By “using a small-scale idea to talk about something that’s a bigger issue,” Berman said he hopes the optimistic film will spur people in the ski community to discuss the environmental effects of climate change, such as drought, which have impacts beyond the ski industry.
The goal of the film is to motivate people in the ski community to act, Berman said. Perhaps if the millions of skiers in the U.S. all wrote to their legislators and ski industry leaders to urge greater investment in renewable energy and other sustainable practices, they could make a difference, he said.
Tonight’s screening is scheduled to take place at 7 in Flickinger Auditorium at Kimball Union Academy. There is a suggested donation $5-10 at the door. Proceeds from a raffle will go to support Protect Our Winters, a Boulder, Colo.-based climate education and advocacy organization.
More information about the film and a link to the trailer can be found at mountaintheoryfilms.com/last-tracks.
Nora Doyle-Burr can be reached at ndoyleburr@vnews.com or 603-727-3213.
