Synopsis: BRAVE NEW WILD is an offbeat chronicle of America’s Golden Age of rock climbing before and after the controversial ascent of the Dawn Wall in 1970. Some forty years later, Oakley Anderson-Moore, the daughter of a pioneering climber, stumbles upon her father’s old hi8 tapes, and sets out to answer the question: why climb when there’s nothing to gain — and everything to lose? Wry humor and an eclectic original soundtrack punctuate the delinquent antics of the Vulgarians in the ‘Gunks, the larger-than-life rivalry of Yosemite’s rock gods, and the fruit tramping, freight train hopping hobodom of her dad’s climbing life. This film is quintessential viewing for those who long for adventure.

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In the early 1970s, when my father would have been about my age when I started this project, he abandoned what appeared to be a promising future to become a penniless rock climber. I grew up getting glimpses of that life; some might say I grew up in the shadow of the mountains of my father’s past, although I only interpreted that my father had a peculiar obsession with rocks. Growing up a climber’s daughter, I was always struck by the dedication to what outsiders often see as such a dangerous — and pointless — activity. But I understood that to my father, climbing was far more than a ‘sport’ — it was a way of life, an ethos, an alternative universe that ultimately made much more sense than the one we lived in. My father had once lived there, helped create that place, and seeing his name in the back of climbing guidebooks along so many first ascents, at the age of 23, I wondered if I could somehow get there, too.

I read every book anyone had ever written on climbing, searched through old newspapers and magazines, memorized by heart the collection of Sheridan Anderson’s climbing cartoons. I traveled across the country with my small and good-natured crew in a ’76 VW van to interview some thirty or forty strangers under the intense glow of camp fire light. I interviewed scholars and relearnt American history from 1933 to 1978.

Like most people that go down the rabbit hole of history, I came out with more answers than I had bargained for. But had I found an answer to the central question, why do people climb? Climbers, my father included, were unusual and unique, motivated by different reasons; the answer was the intersection of a thousand different people, places, and events. I wanted the film to be a reflection of that, to be made up of intersections of stories that accumulate into a world of your own interpretation. I wanted the style to be true to the eclectic nature of the people in the story, to be often tongue-in-cheek and slightly subversive. The climber’s philosophy was not about conquering stuff, making your country proud, or following the American dream. Climbing was a fierce expression of existence. I had embarked on a journey to understand my father, and therefore, the Golden Age and the world of climbing. Now I invite you to look at this world through the kaleidoscope and see if you don’t find some meaning in that distant rock formation on the horizon.

Oakley Anderson-Moore is from the small town of Ellensburg, Washington but spent half her childhood living in foreign countries from Brazil to the Philippines, and that mixed looking glass guides her style of storytelling. After graduating with highest distinction in Media:Film/Video and Theatre Arts at UC San Diego, Anderson-Moore worked as the L.A. street blogger for Nike’s/LinkTV’s Play City campaign, using multimedia to profile inspirational youth in Los Angeles from activists to skateboarders. She is a feature writer at Nofilmschool.com, where she has interviewed directors from Joel Potrykus to Kat Candler. Director Sally Potter (The Man Who Cried) called a work-in-progress scene from Brave New Wild “a fascinating glimpse into the obsessive culture of rock climbing…” The film was one of ten accepted into the 2012 IFP Independent Documentary Lab, and marks Oakley’s feature documentary debut.

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