Still: ALPHA. © Douwe Hennink

It’s the kind of movie that makes you feel like you’ve got frostbite. Jan-Willem van Ewijk’s feature Alpha. (screening in Venice’s Giornate degli Autori) was shot high up in the Swiss and Slovenian Alps - and you can feel the chill.

If the remote, snow-bound landscapes look forbidding, that’s because the director went to exhaustive lengths to make the film authentic. It was made, the director boasts, “with no CGI whatsoever.”

“As with my last movie Atlantic., I like things to be real,” Van Ewijk refers to his 2014 feature about a Moroccan fisherman trying to windsurf to Europe. He shot that film four miles off the coast, on the Atlantic Ocean. With Alpha., he and his crew were often 2,000 metres above sea level.

This is a story about a father and son - starring a real-life father and son. Rein (Reinout Scholten van Aschat) is a young snowboard teacher trying to cope with a family bereavement. He is visited in his mountain resort by his charismatic and slightly overbearing dad, Gijs (Gijs Scholten van Aschat). There is deep affection but also attrition between the two men. Gijs’ outrageous flirting with Rein’s girlfriend heightens tensions between them. When a mountain trip goes wrong, they end up in a primal fight for survival.

“It was very cold. All of us, we had these special heating pads in your shoes. Some people had them in their gloves. The actors actually had to wear this heated, very thin thermal, underwear that kept them warm.”

The director pays tribute to line producer Pascalle Kleingeld who dealt with the daunting logistics involved in shooting at altitude. “She made sure that mountain guides had prepared special steps in snow for the actors to walk down,” Van Ewijk gives one example of the meticulous preparation that went into the movie.

In one key scene, the son is shown buried under an avalanche. The father desperately digs him out. The fact that Gijs and Reinout were a real life father and son raised the stakes. Both actors told the director that it was “quite therapeutic” to make the movie.

“For them, it was a very intense experience but also a very valuable one.”

Father Gijs overcame a fear of heights to play his role and both he and Reinout were “quite nervous” about working so closely together. Slowly, they relaxed into the production. “They took a lot of their own dynamic and their own ideas into the film…and some of the script they came up with themselves.”

In conceiving Alpha., the director was influenced both by the “realism” of Kevin Macdonald’s celebrated documentary Touching the Void (2003), about British mountaineers struggling to get down from a peak in the Andes, and by the “dry humour” of Force Majeure (2014), Ruben Östlund’s drama about human behaviour in the face of an avalanche.

Van Ewijk was working with producer Frank Hoeve of Amsterdam-based BALDR Film whom he credits for being prepared to shoot in “very tough” Alpine locations. “He wasn’t afraid of it at all. He made everything possible.”

This wasn’t an easy project to complete.

“Everything went wrong in pre-production,” the director sighs. “Three weeks before we were about to shoot, we stopped the whole thing.”

First, cast and crew struggled with Covid. Then, the filmmakers discovered that a huge military airforce exercise was planned for right above the valley where much of the filming was due to take place. “It was three weeks non-stop every day, jets with after burners!”

Hoeve postponed production and line producer Kleingeld suggested they should consider moving the shoot to Slovenia as well as Switzerland. It turned out to be an inspired decision. The co-producers on Alpha are Lomotion in Switzerland and Staragara in Slovenia. September Film is the Dutch distributor.

This may have been a relatively small budget production but it has astonishing photography (by cinematographer Douwe Hennink in only his second movie) that includes a James Bond-like snowboarding sequence and scenes shot in a helicopter. 

“I’ve often wondered what it is, my fascination with these extreme sports, and also (with) survival,” filmmaker Van Ewijk speculates what has made him into quite such an adrenalin junkie. “I was in the hospital as a very young child when I was four. I nearly died because of a problem with my intestines…I think this period was quite formative. Somehow, being close to death may have led me to reach for extreme things later on in life.”

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Alpha. is written and directed by Jan-Willem van Ewijk. The film is produced by BALDR Film (NL) in co-production with Lomotion (CH), Staragara (SL), VPRO (NL), SRF / SRG SSR (CH) and blue Entertainment (CH) and has been supported by the Netherlands Film Fund, Netherlands Film Production Incentive, CoBO Fund, Federal Office of Culture (FOC), Slovenian Film Centre and Creative Europe Media.

For more information on Venice International Film Festival, click here.