Science Of The Sublime explores the experience of time in the High Sierra, California. It is a journey tackled through the eyes and words of the director in conversation with people who have gleaned significant experience of this environment: writers, scientists, climbers, and skiers. The film aims to unravel what it is that makes us want to return to this place, what compels some of us to suffer through days and nights of hardship to get back up here time and again, to experience something we can't encounter anywhere else in the world.

We encounter a day as a fleeting moment as we actively move through the mountains, endure their tests and bask in the raw beauty. At the same time, the connectedness with the Earth that we experience up here sets the stage for an appreciation of something greater than ourselves — a much longer perspective. A deep time encounter.

Approaching the inexplicable and the sublime, the film plunges into the feeling of a temporality radically different from what we are accustomed to. Rigorously investigated through the minds of alpine fanatics, we approach something like the “science of the sublime.”

How time is experienced differently in the High Sierra compared to that of ordinary life in the lowlands is the central question driving the film. It is an experimental work and therefore takes a nonconventional form.

Deliberate chaos inhabits each frame. The film attempts to force the question: “What are we looking at?” Because when you are Up There, when you forget everything else and inhale the present, you will wonder what is this alien landscape that you are surrounded by.

VO by the director in conversation with expert commentators serve as a guide through the experience. While many of the featured subjects make a living studying or communing with the Sierra, we encounter them in a deeply personal way.

Director: Emanuel Röhss

Co-producer: Matthew Doyle

Assistant director: Kevin Luna

Cinematographers: Albert England, Brandon Michael Kelley

Composer: Maxwell Sterling

Mixing: Dusk Bennett

Cast: Kim Stanley Robinson, Peter Croft, Hari Mix, Kate Rutherford, Vitaliy Musiyenko, Blair Nicodemus, Greg Stock

Runtime: 15:34

Format: H264, stereo sound

Science of the Sublime was produced in partnership with the Swedish Arts Grants Committee.