This 2025 short documentary film follows professional athlete Alenka Mali who wants to combine snowboarding and BASE jumping.
It opens with a brief biography, charting her childhood outdoors in Argentina and Slovenia, her early and enduring passion for snowboarding, and her growing fascination with BASE jumping. As her ambition begins to take shape, the logistical difficulties and physical danger become apparent.
“We need to consider the option that I might die,” the 24-year-old states matter-of-factly. “Every single BASE jump, that’s an option.”
Mali and her mother snowboarding. Photo: Screenshot
Goat Ridge
Our deuteragonist is 1,762m Goat Ridge near Squamish, British Columbia. Mali has been coming to Squamish for years to visit her father, who now lives there. From the start, the steep and striking peak has been the focus of her snowboard/BASE jump ambitions.
The film follows Mali and her mother on the snow-covered slopes outside Squamish. Sweeping drone shots of the vast peaks are interspersed with closeups of Mali and her mother. The narration aligns, Mali almost lost for words at the “unreal” experience of sharing the overwhelming power of the mountains.
Goat Ridge. Photo: Screenshot
The jump
“You don’t want to do it if [the wind]’s not perfect,” Mali says. She got up early in the morning, hoping to do the jump, but gusty conditions mean an immediate no-go. All the training, planning, and logistical complications in the world won’t make the weather cooperate.
Finally it happens: the wind slows, quiets, and finally everything is still. Then Mali snowboards off a cliff.
Mali going over the edge. Photo: Screenshot
There’s a terrible moment of free-fall, and then the parachute deploys, and the camera is along for the ride as she soars over the snow-covered slopes.Her friend Spencer follows her as, in a state of exuberant shock, she sits in the snow.
“I’m going to be doing this for as long as I can,” she says. What she can’t say is why, exactly, she is compelled, why she, her mother, and so many others feel that “the mountains will… cure anything.”
