Updated January 2018
The most exciting parts of any story are usually the begining and the end. The Whistler Film Festival (Nov – Dec) knows this all too well. That’s why they opened the 2017 festival with The Darkest Hour, a world- and Award-Season-ready WWI drama wherein Gary Oldman gives one of the strongest performances of the year as Winston Churchill.
And to close out the festival, they showed The Moment, a Dogtown-style documentary with local roots about the beginning days of Freeride Mountain Biking.
The Woman Behind The Moment
Darcy Turenne Hennessey, director of The Moment, has deep Sea to Sky roots and used to be a professional mountain biker. For over a decade Darcy travelled the world for competitions and photo shoots. That was before she “retired” to focus on life on the other side of the camera.
Retirement seems to be working out. In 2016, Darcy was walking the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival in support of her short film Jackieland. However, she says having her work recognized here at home is equally important.
“The Whistler Film Festival was one of my goals right from the start with this one,” Darcy says. “With so much of the story and characters coming from right here in the Sea to Sky, it seemed like a perfect fit. It’s amazing to have an established festival like this that’s celebrating our local culture and history.”
Assembled in true documentary format, not the action based shred-style of most mountain bike films, The Moment chronicles the story behind the first Kranked bike film and the British Colombia locations, personalities and attitudes that inspired the bike world to go free.
“There was an ominous North Shore scene that no one knew about,” explains bike pioneer Richie Schley, who is featured in The Moment. “And Kamloops was another thing, big steep lines. There was a bit of competitiveness, but really it was two scenes that needed to come together. After that it blew up like a roman candle.”
The Making of The Moment
With boxes of 20-year-old footage from original Kranked filmmakers Christian Begin and Bjorn Enga, Turenne began interviewing the key players and piecing together her story. “At first I was worried about the task of combining hundreds of hours of footage with 30 different interviews and so many storylines, but everything came together,” she says. “But in the end, it is the same movie I originally envisioned. I wanted depth over breadth. I wanted to go deep into this one piece of time, rather than covering a lot of topics over the past two decades. This movie really is about that moment that started everything.”
Come for the films, stay for the mountains. Learn more about Whistler’s mountain culture including skiing, snowboarding, mountain biking and creative community at Whistler.com.
