The 2026 AlpinFilm Festival will occur on Jan.16 and 17 in Jackson at Black Diamond and The Center for the Arts. This annual celebration of mountain storytelling is produced by the Teton Climbers Coalition.
Jeff Counts: Christian Beckwith, welcome back to OnSet. Thanks for having me. When you and I first spoke back in 2023, the inaugural AlpinFilm was about to launch. So here we are now, a couple of years later. How are things going with the festival?
Christian Beckwith: It’s been super great and really interesting to see it evolve. This year we’ve leaned into our community on a much larger level. And we’ve been focused on something that’s central to what all of us love to do outdoors, which is protecting the places where we love to recreate. So we’ve developed a focus with the help of a number of folks who are part of this year’s festival and the focus is on our public lands and waters. And the ways that we can help to protect them as outdoor athletes, as adventure athletes, to ensure they’re here both for ourselves, but also the generations that come after us.
JC: I know that having a focus is important to you and to AlpinFilm. I remember in 2023 the focus was on the incredible women who have been and continue to be so influential in climbing and mountaineering. I picked up on, when I saw this year’s slate of films, additional refrains like friendship and legacy and even sanctuary. Are those things important to you as well?
CB: I think they’re just central to our adventures writ large, like so many of our community members in the climbing and the skiing and the paddling, outdoor adventure communities. We cherish those elements of our adventures. What we’re really asking this year is how do we leverage this passion that we have, these communities that develop around these things we love to do into a force for good to ensure that these places that we just love. We’re so passionate about them. How do we lean into that passion? How do we convert it into action? And over the course of the past year in particular, we’ve seen threats to our public lands and waters that we haven’t seen for at least a decade. And if we’re not unified in our response and if we are not acting quickly and in concert. We run the risk of losing these places. And as someone once said, every environmental victory is temporary and every defeat is permanent.
JC: These movies are not only made for insiders. Why do you think that film has stayed such an important part of the outdoor adventure culture, even though many of the people who will watch may have no personal frame of reference for what they’re seeing?
Christian Beckwith: These stories have to be told from the first person. So if you’re talking about ball sports, for example, whether it’s basketball or football or whatever, they can often be told in a journalistic format. And I think the difference with the things that we love to do is that we need to hear it from the protagonists themselves. And so all of these films capture the passion and the adrenaline and the fear and the love and the camaraderie. From a first-person perspective. And that’s one of the things that makes them so powerful. The other thing that makes him really powerful is their good films. Like we looked at, my eyes are bleeding, probably 300 films from around the world and selecting the ones for this year’s festival. And what we’re really interested in is good storytelling. And I think every single one of the films that we’ve chosen for this year’s lineup tells a good story.
JC: How has the work of Teton Climbers Coalition evolved since we last chatted? Beyond bringing fantastic mountain films to the region, what are the group’s priorities these days?
Christian Beckwith: Well, we wanna ensure that our community has the capacity, the skills and the confidence to go into the mountain safely. So we have the safe climbing initiative that’s running all winter at the climbing gym. And we work with Exum and Jackson Hole Mountain Guides to teach skills people need to stay safe when they’re outside climbing. We last summer began an initiative to rehabilitate the Delta Lake Trail. So the social trail to Delta Lake, as anybody who’s been on it knows, has been loved to death and has been degraded. There’s litter, there’s braiding. And we just announced today, actually, that the Grand Teton National Park Foundation, as a result of our advocacy, has agreed to fund phase one of the rehabilitation project. And that ties into this commitment that we have to stewardship. We put out surveys every year and we ask our community what they want to see from us and across the board, every single year, people say stewardship and that takes a couple of different forms. Our climbing area modernization project goes around and ensures that all the hardware at all our crags is safe and up to date. We’ve been replacing all the bolted anchors with mussy hook anchors, which are simply much safer. But I think the Delta Lake Trail Project is the first time we’ve had boots on the ground, as it were, in the park proper. We have done work on Blacktail Butte as well, which is also part of the park. But this is all part of our greater effort to ensure that these places are healthy, that they remain as gorgeous and as inspiring as they always have, not just for us, but also future generations.
JC: Where can people learn more about the festival and get information on the screenings and the other events?
Christian Beckwith: You can check it out at Tetonclimbers.com. We’re opening up at Black Diamond this year, four o’clock on Friday, with a panel discussion. We’ve got amazing featured speakers and they’re all local. So we have Anna Gibson, who’s headed over to the Olympics next month, but next weekend she’s gonna be here in Jackson with AlpinFilm. Eric Boomer is a Teton Valley, Idaho resident, who is one of the great whitewater kayakers in America at the time. He also learned to climb by on sighting a big wall in Baffin Island, which is absolutely mind-boggling. And he’s been part of our deliberations as well around this theme of public lands. So is Kelly Helpin, and so she grew up here. She’s just an amazing endurance runner and mountain runner, and she’s been part of the programmatic development as well. So just getting these folks to be part of not only the festival, but designing our efforts to shift the culture in Jackson around outdoor recreation from Stoke to something that’s akin to stewardship.
JC: Christian, it’s great to talk to you again. Best of luck with the festival, and thanks for joining me [on] On Set.
CB: Really appreciate the opportunity. Hope to see you there.
