In short, The Wall - Climb for Gold follows four Adidas sponsored climbers for two years in the leadup to climbing's Olympic debut on 2021. Janja Garnbret, Shauna Coxsey, Brooke Raboutou, and Miho Nonaka, give unprecedented access to the highs, the lows, and the challenges the four athletes faced as potential history makers. In a sport where the difference between winning and losing is measured in millimetres and fractions of a second The Wall brings a focus to the reality behind those seconds and the pressures that expectation brings.

As a historical reference The Wall is unique. There will only be one Olympic debut for a "new" sport and for at least one of the lead players there would only be one Olympics, with Shauna Coxsey announcing her post-Olympic retirement in the run-up to Tokyo 2020. The debut status brought unique pressures for all four athletes, from adapting to a new format that combined three different disciplines into a single competition to dealing with being irreplaceable role models for their sport. Throw in both personal and national expectations and you have a pressure cooker in which each athlete faced as much of a mental battle as a physical one. 

The choice of Janja Garnbret, Shauna Coxsey, Brooke Raboutou, and Miho Nonaka as the subjects was inspired. Nonkana carried the hopes of the home nation while Garnbret carried both a nation and a sport's expectations and Raboutou and Coxsey spanned almost a decade in age difference yet sharing an almost identical ambition. Nobody just becomes an Olympic quality athlete and in The Wall you get an insight into what set the four women on such an improbable road, delving into the individual back-stories that inspired them to compete before they were even teens. With access not only to the athletes, but also their families and friends, The Wall gives a unique perspective you simply wouldn't get in any other Olympian's day to day life and the rollercoaster of emotions felt by all those invested in each of the four climbers.  

For a "climbing" film there's not actually much climbing, but that is one of the film's strengths. In a sport that's measured in such fine margins it's easy to skip over the hours, months and years that led up to Tokyo, but to do so would be to only tell a fraction of the story. The climbing won the medals but The Wall - Climb for Gold is a film about life. It blows away pre-conceptions of what a sponsored athlete's life is like away from the glamour of competitions and photo shoots. You see world class athletes struggling both physically and mentally while a clock ticks down inexorably, feeling the same self-doubts we all have in our lives. Climbing may be the vessel but the story is the emotions, the resilience, the agony and the joy of pursuing a dream to the end.

The Wall - Climb for Gold  was released globally on digital via Apple and Amazon Prime on 18th January 2022