Beyond the Summit with Jimmy Chin

Overview

Jimmy Chin is no stranger to peering at the world from angles that most folks don't see. He's also familiar with hitting peaks. As a mountain athlete, scaling great heights has been his job; however, the above descriptions also apply to his work as a filmmaker. With his partner Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, he won the Best Documentary Feature Oscar for Free Solo. Before that, the pair took home an audience award at Sundance for the also climbing-focused Meru. The Rescue, their doco about the efforts to free 12 Thai schoolboys and their soccer coach from the Tham Luang Nang Non cave system, earned them more acclaim — and both Annette Bening (Apples Never Fall) and Jodie Foster (True Detective: Night Country) scored Academy Award noms for starring in the duo's feature debut Nyad.

Get Chin talking, then, and he'll clearly have much to discuss — about his work as a director and a mountaineer alike. On his first appearance in Australia, he's doing just that at Sydney Film Festival and Vivid Sydney. The two events are co-hosting Beyond the Summit with Jimmy Chin, where the Oscar-winner, National Geographic photographer and author will be behind the microphone for one night only.

How does someone who clambers up mountains then become a celebrated documentarian? How did skills in the former help with the latter — not just when climbing is the focus on-screen, as was clearly the case with Meru, and also with Free Solo's chronicle of Alex Honnold's El Capitan ascent sans ropes, but in general? Why do extraordinary feats, including Diana Nyad's 110-mile ocean swim, appeal to Chin as a filmmaker? They're just some of the threads that this in-conversation session, which is taking place on Friday, June 13, 2025 at Sydney Town Hall, might cover.

Chin will dig into shooting in extreme conditions, too, alongside how being a professional adventurer influences the way he sees the natural world on film.

National Geographic/Jimmy Chin