THE THIN AIR BETWEEN

WHY THIS STORY?

Over the years we've chased stories of people holding on in impossible circumstances - war zones, refugee camps, industrial zones, forgotten people in forgotten places. With 'The Thin Air Between' we wanted to explore the same question of resilience, but in a place we’d never looked before: inside one man, on one mountain, over one relentless day. Joe Petrowski gave us a little over fourteen hours to tell his story. No second takes, no safety net. From the moment he rolled out of Genoa at dusk until he reached the summit of Mont Blanc the next morning, everything had to be captured in real time. That meant running multiple cameras on bikes, in cars, on foot, and eventually on the ropes above 4,000 metres. For the final climb we strapped tiny action cameras to the two friends pacing him, so the lens was never more than an arm’s length from his face. When he was gasping from exhaustion, when he was shouting at the storm, when he was too focused to speak at all - the camera was right there, breathing the same thin air. We didn’t want to illustrate suffering; we wanted the audience to inhabit it, the same way Joe inhabited it for fourteen plus hours. In the end the mountain did what it always does - it stripped away everything that wasn’t essential. Our job was to stay close enough, and quiet enough, to record what was left.