Climb Perfectly, Or Die: Inside The Oscar-Nominated Documentary 'Free Solo'
The nominees for best documentary feature at this year’s Academy Awards include “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” “Minding the Gap,” “Of Fathers and Sons” and “RBG” — and one film that had audiences around the country sweating buckets: “Free Solo.”
The National Geographic documentary follows climber Alex Honnold in his quest to become the first person to “free solo” Yosemite National Park’s famed, 3,000-foot rock wall El Capitan, climbing it without any ropes to catch him if he fell.
The stakes were high: climb perfectly, or die.
“I certainly was trying to avoid that,” says Honnold, who had long dreamed of achieving the feat and spent years in the run-up carefully calibrating the climb’s each and every move. “But even more so, I was just
