Why ‘Ashima’ the Film is Absolutely Worth Your Time

Kenji Tsukamoto is not the first documentarian to make a film about Ashima Shiraishi. Most people who didn’t learn about her from her record-breaking headlines probably saw her for the first time in Reel Rock’s 2017 documentary Young Guns, which follows young Ashima and Kai Lightner climbing hard despite their age.

At first glance, Tsukamoto’s 2023 film Ashima is in the same vein as Young Guns. Ashima also follows a 13-year-old Ashima Shiraishi as she attempts to be the youngest person—and second woman ever—to climb V14. The documentary goes to great lengths to explain the sheer, unexplainable difficulty that is V14 to a non-climber. But it’s far from a simple bouldering film.

Instead, Tsukamoto’s film is a delicate portrait of a girl and her father grappling with the possibility of greatness. While the film’s titular character is Ashima, Shiraishi’s father, Hisatoshi Shiraishi is just as prominent. Ultimately, it’s their relationship that Tsukamoto portrays so vividly in his documentary.

 

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Tsukamoto shot the film nine years ago, while living in New York with the Shiraishi family. He spent several years living with the Shiraishis, filming everything from family dinners, to Ashima doing homework, and of course, Ashima climbing. In an interview with Tsukamoto at the San Diego Asian Film Festival, Tsukamoto said he was treated like the Shiraishis’s own son, and it’s this intimacy and the access he was granted that makes the film so powerful.

The film opens with Ashima’s initial falls on her V14 project, Golden Shadow, in Rocklands, South Africa. She laments, “It’s impossible.” Then, the audience hears Hisatoshi’s voice for the first time. “Give it one more try. If it’s impossible, we’ll leave.” His voice is frank, no-nonsense, and devoid of the usual energetic encouragement one grows accustomed to in bouldering films, which are so often defined by their explosive energy.

[Watch the film at Outside Fest on June 2]

Ashima sits in direct contrast to mainstays of the bouldering genre like Josh Lowell’s Rampage or Mellow’s hard-crushing videos. Tsukamoto has a real auteur’s touch. The movie is beautifully shot, with rich, but understated scenes of New York and Rocklands, backed by a quiet, swelling, classical score, resulting in something rather contemplative. Tsukamoto worked with photographer and filmmaker Jimmy Chin before setting off on his own, and he seems to have learned the finer arts of a beautiful climbing film; foregrounding the beauty of the landscape and the poignancy of the human relationships which give climbs true significance.

In many ways our current bouldering film genre is defined by its low-budget amateur aesthetic and vibe; fish-eye lenses and shaky, low-resolution camcorder shots. They’re as dynamically exciting and entertaining as a good boulder, but Ashima doesn’t have any of that. With its sweeping, wide-angle shots, and its slow, quiet progression, it feels less like a bouldering film and more like a human drama which happens to center around climbing. The best climbing analog I can come up with is Patagonia’s 2020 film Stone Locals, which is much more about what climbing means to its climbers, than what it is they’re climbing.

Hisatoshi’s relationship with Ashima is demanding; he leaves her very little room for failure or lack of discipline. When Ashima’s falls on Golden Shadow, there’s no question that if she doesn’t top out, it would be disappointment to her father. In an especially difficult to watch scene, Ashima falls hard on her tailbone off the overhanging face of Golden Shadow, missing the pads completely. As she gets up, there’s a quiver in her voice, and she’s rattled as her dad walks up, scolding her and telling her she isn’t focused enough. Hisatoshi never spots his daughter, despite her small size and a large rock at Golden Shadow’s landing which makes her falls relatively serious. Instead, he chides and scolds her while smoking a cigarette.

Tsukamoto touches on Hisatoshi’s history in New York as a professional Butoh dancer, a highly physical Japanese dance practice. Despite not being a climber, Hisatoshi is Ashima’s primary coach, drawing on his dance background to guide her mentally and physically. Hisatoshi coaches Ashima with the same rigor with which he studied Butoh. In some endearing scenes, Ashima stands up to her dad, telling him off for his demanding attitude. These moments are never greeted with anger from her father, which softens the weight of Hisatoshi’s presence, and reminds you that they do love each other.

Towards the end of the film, Ashima starts to lose enthusiasm for her project, which is looking increasingly impossible and height-dependent. Hisatoshi begins packing her stuff up, telling her gruffly she won’t be able to top out, as his daughter stands on the verge of tears. “I want to climb!” she cries. “You’re not climbing,” comes Hisatoshi’s firm reply. She continues to insist as they hike back towards the car until, finally, Hisatoshi turns to her and instructs her to shout something as loud as she can to clear her mind. She demurs. “ASHIMA!” he shouts into the void. She demurs again. “ASHIMA!” She demurs.

Finally, she yells a small “Otou-san!”(Dad). They volley shouts back and forth into the South African landscape until Hisatoshi is satisfied, and then they quietly make their way back to the crag. It’s beautiful, endearing and funny, and it encapsulates the emotional conflict of the film: what happens when the pressure for greatness and the love of a parent and child meet?

Because Ashima goes beyond just a climbing or bouldering film, it can be hard to understand why, aside from outside pressure, Ashima is pursuing Golden Shadow at all. Most niche sport documentaries geared towards a broader audience, as Ashima is, go out of their way to make the importance and motivation of the athlete understood.

Stoke serves as the driving force in many climbing films. In Jimmy Chin’s Meru, the goal is to climb where no one has climbed before. In Wide Boyz, the objective is to show America that they, too, can climb hard off-widths. But Ashima’s excitement for climbing is often obscured by the punishing nature of her climbing sessions, and a lack of illumination on why she’s psyched for Golden Shadow in particular. Her dad chooses all of her projects, and we don’t ever get to see her really extol the beauty of the line or the perfection of the moves.

In the closing scene of the documentary, we see a clip of Ashima during her 2014 TEDxTeen talk. “Have you ever felt as if you’re overwhelmed by problems?” she says, “sometimes you might feel like you’re trapped or you’re facing a wall.” But we never get to know why she wants over that wall to begin with.

Ashima is likely one of the most beautifully shot, and emotionally complex climbing documentaries of the last several years. Its intimate closeness with its subjects makes it all the more powerful. It isn’t just a climbing film—it’s a human drama. Ashima is among the climbing documentaries that mark a shift from hard-crushing send videos into the realm of more accessible documentaries. As climbing grows more diverse and popular, so too will the media and art we make about it, and Ashima is a wonderful example of our sport’s evolution.

On May 9th, Climbing interviewed Director Kenji Tsukamoto. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. 

The Interview

Climbing: Tell me a little bit of your start in filmmaking. Were you always interested in documentary filmmaking? Or were you working on other stuff, too?

Tsukamoto: No, it just kind of randomly happened. I was in college and I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I was taking a lot of art classes, like drawing and ceramics. And then one of my second cousins decided to go back to grad school and study film. I was at my aunt’s house, in the Bay Area, for Christmas, and I remember her saying, “Cousin Eli made a movie.” I was like, “What?” It was called Winning the Peace. After watching it, I think that was the first time I realized that people made movies.

A couple months later, my cousin came out to Utah for the Sundance Film Festival, and I met him and his lead actor. I think that’s what got it started for me. I was like, “Oh, I could go into film.” I enjoyed watching movies. I didn’t know anything about making them. I wasn’t one of those kids that grew up shooting stuff on a camcorder. It was kind of intimidating at first being in film school, because everyone else had a lot of hard skills and experience making things, and I had zero idea. And then I think I fell into documentaries because I didn’t like some of the other kids in my program, and I didn’t like being on set for 12 hours. That didn’t sound fun to me.

Climbing: When I watched you talk at the San Diego Asian Film Festival, you mentioned working with Jimmy Chin. What was that experience like?

Tsukamoto: After film school, I worked as an assistant to the VP of Lionsgate production. I was reading scripts, and we were in pre-production for the first Hunger Games film.

I really looked up to Jimmy—he was one of the few Asian American people in the outdoors that were very visible. When I was younger, I wanted to be a photographer, so I grew up idolizing Jimmy. That was 2011, before he was a household name. I followed his blog, where I read that his company, Camp4Collective, was hiring, and I emailed them my resume. That was it; it was just a cold email. That’s not usually how you get jobs in the industry—it’s always who you know. Jimmy’s business partner at the time, Tim Kemple, wrote back saying they were interested, but that I’d need to move to Utah. I moved that fall.

I didn’t really know who Renan Ozturk [Ozturk was the third founder of Camp4 Collective] or Tim were. But it was great being able to work for all three of them. It was very early on in Camp4’s life—I was employee number three or four. Since then they’ve all branched away.

Climbing: You’re not a climber right?

Tsukamoto: Not at all. Zero.

Climbing: So how did you get from zero percent climber to Ashima? What was the connection there?

Tsukamoto: In my last year in school, I made a short documentary about Japanese American internment during World War II in Utah, and it aired on the local PBS station. When I was working at Camp4, that short won an Emmy. I don’t think I told them a short I made had just won an Emmy, but somehow it got brought up. They all congratulated me. And I think it was Tim who was like, “Hey, we shot this young Japanese American climber named Ashima. She’s going to be the future of the sport, you should look into her.” So I got out our hard drives, saw the footage that Tim had shot, and I thought there might be something there. Then I just called Ashima’s parents out of the blue and mentioned Tim’s name. Ashima and her parents really loved Tim, so there was an automatic trust.

It helped that I spoke Japanese. That fall, I went and visited Ashima and spent a week with her. That kind of kick-started the project. I just saw a lot of need. And Ashima has a family life where any kind of media inquiry, or if there were any questions from potential sponsors, it took her family a long time to respond to their emails. Her mom would sit there with an English-Japanese dictionary. I offered to help manage Ashima and, in turn, they gave me access to their lives.

I lived with the family for over a year before I started filming for real, just to make sure that they were comfortable having me around. I was basically treated as a member of the family. Once Ashima’s parents were okay with me filming, I quit my job at Camp4. I think it was Renan who was like, “Dude, we don’t pay you enough to stay here, you should go out and make this film.”

Climbing: How long did you live with them?

Tsukamoto: On and off for three or four years. The film is one year of her life when she was 13.

Climbing: What’s it like filming with someone you’re close with?

Tsukamoto: I was very wary of how much of an impact this would have on Ashima. Because all of a sudden, there’s this random person in the house, and she’s an only-child. At first, I had asked some friends to collaborate with me on this. And they were both over six-foot-tall white men. Ashima’s parents treated them as guests, and it kind of changed the flow in the home. Since I had spent so much time embedded with the family, being with them, and I understood their culture, I found that it was easier just to film on my own.

I couldn’t afford to pay someone to be with me. So everything was a one-man-band kind of job. Her parents were very gracious. They let me film anything I wanted; family arguments and discussions, discussions about financial things. But when it came to Ashima, I was a lot more careful and considered a lot more of how it was going to impact her long term. When she would have breakdowns where she would cry, or moments where she was sad, I would stop recording and have conversations with her. Our relationship as friends, or our sort of brother-sister relationship was more important than capturing things for the movie.

Climbing: When you were editing the film, were you watching a lot of climbing documentaries?

Tsukamoto: No, not at all. It’s not like I was interested in climbing. I wasn’t interested in climbing at all, really. My job at Camp4 was on the technology side of things. I would assist with editing. I watched and logged all the footage from when Conrad, Renan, and Jimmy went and climbed Meru, so I’d seen a lot of stuff. But even back then, I couldn’t tell you the difference between sport climbing, bouldering, and alpine climbing—I didn’t know. And when I hung out with Ashima, I would ask her questions like, “I don’t understand, why is it called sport climbing?” My idea of what was hard and easy was also definitely skewed; Ashima would warm up on a V5 or a V6. When I finally gave one a try, I was like, “What in the world like, her warm ups are so hard!”

Early skateboard or surf or snowboard films were just sport-focused. It’s like porn, right? Epic tricks. Music. I’m guessing that’s what early climbing films were like. But my intention with the film from the beginning was for it to be about her family. I wanted to do this film because I was more interested in what Ashima was going through as an 11-year-old girl who’s always around adults. Her parents were in their 50s when they had her, so she’s with what most people would consider grandparents. And when she’s at the gym, she’s hanging out and climbing with college or professional working men. She’s not hanging out with other 11-year-old girls at the climbing gym. She doesn’t climb on a team or anything like that. So she’s always around older people, especially older white men.

The climbing world is very Eurocentric. It’s changing slowly; now you see all these Japanese climbers crushing it, but back then it was just a bunch of white people. Ashima went to a private school on the Upper East Side. She was balancing what it’s like to be very Japanese at home while trying to assimilate when at school or at the gym. I found her being a third-culture kid in every aspect of her life very interesting.

Climbing: Can you talk a little bit about balancing the themes of climbing and family?

Tsukamoto: We had multiple edits, and on that climbing trip to South Africa, she climbed Golden Shadow, but she also climbed a V11, V12, and a V13 that she climbed multiple times. And most of those she sent in a day or a few hours. So we were trying to figure out what to show; do we show progression of her climbing a V11 one day, a V12 the next, and then her trying a V14? Because some of these climbs are visually more appealing than Golden Shadow. Golden Shadow is not necessarily a beautiful climb to watch. So we tried a few different edits, trying to figure out what to do.

We had a three-hour version of the film that had her climbing a few things before we got to Golden Shadow. But in this day and age, everyone compares everything to Free Solo. When I tell people I’m doing like a climbing doc, they’re like, “Oh, cool, I can’t wait to see Ashima on a 3,000-foot cliff.” And I’m like, “This is not that at all. It’s bouldering.” People don’t know what that means. We test screened this film a lot with climbers and non-climbers. A lot of people were confused because, when we go to Spain, you see her sport climb, and they think a V14 is gonna be something like that. Then they see her climb Golden Shadow, and they’re like, “That’s the V14?” They didn’t get it. So we had to add a lot more.

Initially, the film was just all verité footage—there’s a full version where we don’t explain anything, and it’s just all conversations at dinner and her on the climb. And I think climbers could understand, because they just know. But non-climbers didn’t get it. So we added all that voiceover stuff and we added the graphics to make it more accessible and easily understandable to non-climbers.

Climbing: At this point, the footage is 10 years old. What were you doing with the footage during that time gap?

Tsukamoto: We just didn’t have any money. And climbing films weren’t really mainstream 10 years ago, so we could get funding or grants. So a lot of the years were spent just trying to get money. It was our editors who saved the film. They brought a lot to the table—all of them had a personal connection to Ashima. Whether it be that they were a climber or Japanese American, everyone had a reason to come on board. Towards the beginning we didn’t have any money, so editors were working their day jobs and then editing at night a couple of hours here and there when they could.

It took us about five years. After I finished filming in 2015, I took a year off to just not look at any of the footage, instead trying to fundraise, and I came back and edited by myself. Over the years, people came and helped.

Everyone who touched this film gave so much; like UCLA law school has a documentary clinic program where they help filmmakers pro bono with all the legal stuff. We could not have made this film without that. They created that program when we were working on our film, and we were one of the first films to be accepted into this UCLA doc clinic. So that’s such a great resource for people. We received a music grant, and TOKiMONSTA, a Grammy nominated producer and DJ, came on board despite our limited budget. He also connected us with David Fincher’s [an acclaimed film director] sound mixer, and he was very gracious and worked within our budget as well. Basically, it was a community effort, from the people who helped watch the film and give feedback, to the key crew members who helped put this film together.

[Watch the film at Outside Fest on June 2]