The 10-minute athlete portrait focuses on the challenges of redefining life after stepping away from competitive athletics
I’d been competing with Team Canada for about six years; last ski season was my first season deciding to step away from competitive skiing and take skiing down a different route with more filmmaking and that type of stuff
Etienne Geoffroy-Gagnon
On Oct. 2, Etienne Geoffroy-Gagnon hosted the premiere of his newest passion project at the Yukon Arts Centre (YAC). Visions From The North is a 10-minute documentary short that delves into the Yukon athlete’s journey from a life of competitive skiing to navigating uncertainty in new beginnings.
“I’d been competing with Team Canada for about six years; last ski season was my first season deciding to step away from competitive skiing and take skiing down a different route with more filmmaking and that type of stuff,” Geoffroy-Gagnon says. “I wanted to capture all those emotions, and everything I was going through in real time, and this was a perfect opportunity to do that.”
Geoffroy-Gagnon is careful not to give too much away from the film, as watching it is the only real way to get the full picture of the athlete’s experiences and the reasons for his decisions, including that of stepping away from a life of competitive skiing and his growing interest in filmmaking.
“There was a lot of internal dialogue there, and a lot of the classic competitive pressures,” he says. “I chose to start pursuing a different route and open up other options, but the movie goes into that in more detail.”
Visions From The North was Geoffroy-Gagnon’s first foray into longer-form video storytelling. He teamed up with Vancouver filmmaker Ty Ulrich and got Mount Sima involved as well.
“I got a bunch of the locals to help me out and we did a nice park shoot at Sima,” Geoffroy-Gagnon says. “The rest of the shooting happened in the backcountry in Squamish and Whistler [B.C.].”
The backcountry shoots took place outside ski resorts, so in addition to plotting out how to properly film the action shots they needed, Goeffrey-Gagnon and Ulrich had to be cognizant of their safety in regards to their travel and the weather. They even built their own jumps for the project.
“We started planning it throughout the summer,” Goeffrey-Gagnon says (meaning the summer of 2024). “And then winter came, and I’d say within the first few months of winter we got a pretty good idea of how difficult it was and that it was definitely not going to be an easy route.”
Completing the gruelling shoots was far from the end of the work, though, and Geoffroy-Gagnon says he and Ulrich have been handling the editing, voice-overs and other post-production work since the shooting wrapped.
“I’ve been used to doing some shooting in the park and on the resort, but never really in the backcountry setting, so I had to take a bit more of a production kind of view of things and help my filmer set up and figure out what our vision was and go a bit more over what we wanted things to look like and take a different perspective rather than just be the skier,” Geoffroy-Gagnon explains. “That was definitely a huge learning opportunity.”
While the film largely focuses on Geoffroy-Gagnon’s decision to move on from competitive skiing and into a new life path, the experiences he had in his six years, representing Canada on a global scale, will always hold a special place for him.
“The last six years with the Canadian team, being able to travel the world and literally pursue the dream I had when I was a little kid, that’s been a huge highlight of mine and I definitely wouldn’t trade that for anything in the world,” he says. “I got to meet some amazing people and see some great places and really push my limits in the sport.
“All good things need to come to an end, eventually, and it just so happened that it worked out that way. With all that being said, those six years are going to be some of the best memories I’m going to have for a long time.”
To describe the atmosphere of his film in one word, Geoffroy-Gagnon chooses reflective.
“Some of the stuff that it goes into is me coming back home and resetting, and the Yukon giving me the opportunity to do that throughout my life, being able to come back to the Yukon and reset and get away from the noise to think about what my next endeavour is going to be,” he says. “So, I’d say it’s a pretty reflective mood but there are a lot of voice-overs of me thinking and talking about the whole experience. But there’s also some pretty epic skiing in there, and that’s obviously my background, so I got a lot of opportunities to showcase that in the film and it definitely makes for a pretty visual piece.”
Geoffroy-Gagnon and Ulrich continuously made tweaks to the project throughout its post-production work, so much that Geoffroy-Gagnon felt he would see the completed version only when everyone else did.
“We’re obviously super happy with what we’ve got, but there’s always more to be done until the timeline pops up,” he says.
The premiere event in Whitehorse took place in early October and featured screenings of some other short films by friends of Geoffroy-Gagnon’s, in addition to his own film, plus speaking introductions and a Q&A by Geoffroy-Gagnon. Visions From The North was also shown at Montreal’s iF3 Festival, which screens primarily freeskiing- and snowboarding-based movies. Following these screenings, Geoffroy-Gagnon is travelling down to Whistler to present the film there, and has started working on ideas for his next visual piece. To keep up with Geoffroy-Gagnon, follow him on Instagram@etienne_geoffroy.
“I think at the end of it, people should just be stoked about embracing change and not being able to switch things up,” he says.
