Today’s Friday Flick is a Banff Film Fest winner about an unlikely but rich connection between freeskiing and jazz music.
The Blackcountry Journal is an utterly unique and brilliantly unexpected short film that melds jazz and backcountry skiing. This is an unlikely combination that makes perfect sense in the film, which begins with skier Mallory Duncan hurrying through the streets of LA, encountering a talkative jazz musician who helps him discover this correlation and expand on it.
From a young age, Mallory Duncan’s life was divided between the city and the mountains. Attending an exclusive middle school with mostly White kids, he dedicated several years of his life to skiing. “I didn’t even own a pair of ski bibs,” he told Freeskier. “I only had training shorts and a ski suit. We would rip groomers every day, trying to perfect a turn. On powder days, we took a break from skiing because we couldn’t run gates. I took a year off before college to try to make the UVM team. That didn’t happen, so I decided to step away from the sport.”
After college he ended up in Bend, Oregon, taking a job as a raft guide and meeting plenty of like-minded rad folks.
“Seven years later, I’m still in Bend. It’s a major city, which is why I like it. I like the growth because it creates a well-rounded experience. The right middle ground, with great skiing nearby and, even though it’s not the most diverse place, a lot going on.”
Bend proved to be the ideal place for Duncan since it’s a city, but access to some of the gnarliest backcountry skiing is close by. But skiing needed to incorporate an inventive element beyond just hucking lines. “It wasn’t going to be hot laps or hitting the park. I needed something creative, something that incorporated art,” he told Freeskier. The film’s narration reflects his love of poetry and hip-hop rhymes.
“I’ve always liked putting my thoughts down on a page. I like that poems and lyrics don’t have to be grammatically correct. They are just a stream of consciousness,” added Duncan. “I wanted to bring this into a ski movie, and in 2020 I wrote the poem [that led to] Blackcountry Journal, my first ski film. We’ll see where it goes from here, but I’m excited to bring more of an urban influence into skiing, opening it up to new people and audiences.”
Check out the full interview with Mallory Duncan in Freeskier.
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