Europe's Forgotten Mountains - Documentary Idea

by Tom
(U of K)

Snowboarding is a worldwide phenomenon that was born out of rejection from mainstream society....sounds dramatic but it's true! Snowboarders were demonised more than any other 'extreme' sports culture; so much so that in the eighties and early nineties snowboarders were banned from most resorts in America.

Anyway, similarly to Skateboarders; snowboarders formed communities within their towns and resorts and a subculture was born. Nevertheless, over the last 20 years snowboarding has become a mainstream success story and although regional and global communities still exist it's true to say that Snowboarders no longer feel repressed, rejected or underground......or part of something that is different or involves a struggle, which has always been the romanticism behind the sport/culture.

My aim with this documentary is to travel around Europe to small hills and obscure mountain ranges where people would never have known snowy peaks even exist, let alone thriving snowboard communities, to document local snowboard scenes and show that there are still groups of people who go to ridiculous measures to ride. The kind of people that start a snowboard club on the island of Majorca, the kind of people that hike for 5 or 6 hours for a single run....the kind of people that have dedicated their lives to a sport that simply shouldn't exist in their environment/climate.

I also want to show that it's possible to snowboard in the most ridiculous places (Morocco, Sicily, Corsica, Greece....the list is endless). So this documentary will not only document local scenes struggling with the adversity of the environment they exist in but also my travels and the extreme measures I'll go to to ride Europe's Forgotten Mountains. It'll form a travel documentary that documents amazing people and scenes along the journey.