Aspiring is the real tale of forgotten silver - a lost film, a lost script and a life-changing expedition by some of NZ's greatest creative minds.
Including extremely rare mountain footage, the documentary imagines six stormy weeks in 1949 that bore incredible artistic fruit. Four great Kiwis travelled the rough roads round Lake Wanaka and into the fabled Matukituki Valley to make a highly creative film about a climb of Mt. Aspiring.
The team was headed by celebrated cameraman Brian Brake (then only 22), and included a young James K Baxter (23) as a scriptwriter. Other team-members were composer Douglas Lilburn (34) and painter John Drawbridge (19). All rose to the very top of their fields, but in 1949 these men were idealists attempting to make a new kind of film - not a standard news reel but a lyrical tribute to NZ mountains - a 'cinematic poem'.
During the trip Baxter wrote script notes that turned into his famous Poem In The Matukituki Valley. Poet and art curator Gregory O'Brien, a long time friend of John Drawbridge, first heard about the trip and the lost footage while interviewing Drawbridge. He describes the journey as 'a point of artistic origin' for him.
The film-makers were helped on the mountain by famous alpinists George Lowe, Ed Cotter and Harry Stevenson. Typically the weather caused havoc with their plans. Unable to reach the summit after six weeks filming Brake took the team home. Not long after that, his lead actor was killed in plane crash and Brake himself became disillusioned with the National Film Unit and left the country. The unfinished masterpiece was never archived, and has been missing for more than half a century.
Aspiring is an evocative documentary about art, mountains and creativity which builds to a surprising end.