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Jill spent nine years building trust, friendship and the story of Cora’s escape from an abusive, polygamist marriage through her artwork. Snowland will be Jill’s first feature length film. Her journey has gone from shooting stills as a middle-schooler, to being a Mountain Dew girl in a series of commercials that paid her college tuition, to running the film projector in what she called a truly great job, to premiering Sister Wife at Sundance and winning the Jury Award at SXSW, to the adventure that Snowland will soon take.

Energy Sovereignty, Authoritarian Regimes, Climate Change, Green Solutions, Decarbonization, Climate-Neutral Future, Energy Poverty, Reliable Energy, US, China, Russia, EU, Developing Countries. For Retired Rear Admiral Mike Hewitt, all people deserve energy, food and clean water. In a world that has a gross inequity of power, he sees nuclear as a clean, cost efficient, consistent and convenient solution. Gone are the reactors of our past, soon to be replaced by Small Modular Reactors (SRMs). Energy Sovereignty will be a defining factor of the twenty-first century. 

It’s easy to see Brad as a superhero because he’s achieved things about which most of of us just dream: Naval Academy graduate, explosives expert, breaker of a thirty year old world record, gold medalist in his second Paralympic sport, husband, father and Ivy League PhD candidate, but his success is the product of his struggles. He was about to quit the swim team at Navy to concentrate on his studies before his teammates voted him Captain for his senior season. He had to talk his way into Explosives Ordnance School because his grades weren’t competitive. Brad is a leader of men and women, who does his best to follow the example of his heroes and mentors, and with compassion and empathy. Strife and struggle have shaped who he is and he continues to seek their benefit daily.

M.C.’s professional career started, or attempted to start when he sent message to Ted Turner that he would walk from Syracuse to Atlanta to get hired by the Braves. As the process took a bad turn, M.C. slipped a dime into a pay phone and was immediately connected with the only Major League Baseball owner who would appreciate his initiative, the iconoclastic and insightful genius Bill Veeck. From the White Sox to the fledgling cable industry, to sports behemoth ESPN, to his own weekly column and to writing a speech to nominate Barack Obama, Antil learned marketing and learned that he could write. “Floor Burns” is his perfectly crafted legacy of how race, religion, changing economics, a basketball game and a highway came together to change his hometown of Syracuse, New York in 1967.

Mattochainsaw is my cousin. After dangerous years of climbing trees as an arborist/tree trimmer, he started down a different path when his wife asked him to carve a bear for the front yard. Chainsaw art–taking a piece of wood, a section of tree, or the extended stump of a felled tree and turning it into a figure and a story. Matt attends competitions, sometimes with creation time limits as short as an hour, carves images from his imagination and does commissions with chainsaw in hand and protective ear muffs

Lonnie’s father was a second generation pro wrestler–a villain, who turned kind, soft and human with his fans after the match. His uncle was a turnaround executive leading several companies from distress and treating everyone with respect. Lonnie followed his uncle’s path, working to right companies in difficulty for thirty years until he started Red Shoes Living to create the kind of culture in companies that he’d learned in his youth. Red Shoes stresses the basics that we know and seem to forget: seeing the person, being thankful, understanding that someone’s actions might be related to an unknown story, treating everyone well and putting yourself out there. You can’t help but be captivated by Lonnie.

Along with twelve buddies on a skiing trip to Val Gardena in Italy, Gregg contracted COVID before anyone knew what to make of it. He’d spend thirty-one days in a coma, waking to an entirely new world, and sixty-four days in the hospital, having to learn to swallow as well as walk. He lost all the fingers on his right hand and all to the one knuckle on his left as the drugs tried to save his internal organs, leaving the extremities vulnerable. He had MRSA, sepsis, kidney failure, liver failure, pulmonary embolisms, and burst lungs — four of them. The first major victory, walking out of the hospital, was more will than skill, then, a little more than nine months after contracting the virus, he returned to skis. The guy with a 1% chance of living felt the wind on his face and the snow below him from the top of the mountain.

While he was still in Chemotherapy, Brian convinced his parents to hit the Nordic jumps at his home in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. With each bigger jump he was more and more hooked. Then he convinced them to let him join the program. Nordic Combined became his sport when he followed his friends not realizing that it meant the pain of Cross-Country skiing, but he soon realized that he had a talent for that pain and was rewarded for being tough the way that he had been as a little kid having to get his blood drawn. That joy and toughness led to two Olympic and five World Championship Teams. Now, he works with one of the preeminent knee clinics in the world, giving so many others an opportunity to live fully. 

Odessa is a Hall of Fame Running Back and the President of Emtrain, a revolutionary eLearning and analytics company that goes beyond compliance to create inclusive workplaces. It’s all of that and a movement to help others find the voice that she shares so beautifully. It’s not about clamoring for equality, but earning equity. It’s about breaking the glass ceiling and empowering others to break the next one. OJ shares so naturally what it means to be a human on a journey with a very distinct why.

I kept Steve’s title lowercase because he usually does and because he doesn’t take himself too seriously, even though he’s undertaking the serious work of brightening the day of children, often with long term stays in the hospital. Steve cashed the $8 check for his first published cartoon, he met his hero and mentor Dr Seuss by arriving at his door mostly unannounced, he dressed up with girlfriend and then wife Diana Golden, the most influential adaptive skier in US history, for her chemotherapy sessions, and brought a city together with one kind gesture when he shined his bike light toward the hospital to say that he’d be thinking of a soon to be discharged patient. The patient flicked his room light in response.

Kara is one of the most respected, beloved and outspoken members of the running community. She was a historic performer and continues as a huge proponent of clean racing both with regard to performance enhancing drugs and technology. With Olympic, Track and Marathon television analysis, she’s a voice of running while also battling Repetitive Exercise Dystonia to continue to enjoy the sport she loves so much.

In Riding with Giants, Peter Holmes à Court demonstrated the honesty and vulnerability to be human, fallible and curious as he searched for his path. His father Robert is credited with being Australia’s first billionaire. His mother Janet was more successful than his father. As their oldest child, Peter was involved in investment banking, music and comedy promotion, cattle, trains, finance, Sydney business promotion, writing and he co-owned the South Sydney Rabbitohs rugby team with Russell Crowe among other ventures. His memoir takes it all in and asks the existential question of what it means to be alive as a father, a businessman, a manufacturer, a creator of beauty and meaning, a member of society and a cyclist, who tries something almost entirely new and most assuredly out of his comfort zone.

Back in ninth grade, I knew that Jeremiah was a performer when he was break dancing for the other team before our soccer games during a school trip to what was then the USSR, but at the time, he was really known as the best athlete in school. September 11th and sense of responsibility for our freedom sent him to the Army, Special Forces and three tours in Iraq. Mental health remains a huge issue for our returning Veterans. Even though a difficult divorce met him at home, volunteering and acting have served as his therapy. He’s consumed, gaining credits, learning everything he can and is studying at the Stella Adler Studio in Los Angeles. Watch for him

Becky Castle has been in social change her whole working life, starting her career with the Carter Center and working with the Gates Foundation among others to try eliminate the biggest threats to life in the developing world. She’s also the mother of the three daughters, hence the Mother of Anarchy for Sisters of Anarchy Ice Cream, which goes from their Fisher Brothers Farm to your cone with some select, hand-chosen partners to create a delicious experience and community. Sisters of Anarchy, along with husband “Farmer Bob,” who is often the butt of jokes and the Sisters most ardent and outspoken supporter, shouts from the rooftops for great girls and women. They celebrate Sister Resistors and even comment on the Oxford comma–and the ice cream tastes great!!

Eduardo is a chef. He’s also an entertainer, a philosopher, a son and a husband. Most significantly, he’s a man, who lives in concert with his world, and seeks ways to bring its beauty to those around him. Art and cooking, the simple and the complex lead to connection. He’s known abandonment and renewal, selfishness and selflessness, and he greats the world with an inviting smile.

Erik has achieved the incomprehensible, climbing the world’s highest mountains and kayaking some of its biggest rapids, but he’s also a thoughtful guy who builds community and shares the beauty that he feels interacting with climbing pitches, rivers and a variety of other places. I think you’ll be amazed at the aesthetic that a blind guy sees in the world.

John broke the World Record for the 100 meter breaststroke at the 1984 Olympic Trials. He broke the Olympic Record in the Prelims, but also told his abductor muscle. Was not winning the gold medal in front of 15,000 fans at home in LA a crushing defeat or a gift? Join us for John’s ride from the top of the world in swimming to the top of the world in entertainment. There are some sliding door moments along the way.

This was a far-ranging conversation that started with Clayton’s wife’s role in the movie Crash. I couldn’t help but think that the race, class, family and gender issues in the movie could easily be applied to the disabled community, even though the film premiered before their son Ezra, an amputee, who is one of the top Paralympic athletes in the world, was born. Through Angel City Sports, an LA-based non-profit co-founded with Ezra, Clayton provides year-round free adaptive sports opportunities for kids, adults, and veterans with physical disabilities or visual impairments.

When Denis and I skied together with his father and a family friend, he searched for a flow on the mountain. A quiet, smiley determination pointed to a sense of curiosity that belied his lack of time on skis. He wanted to get it right. Skiing is my expertise, but I see that same sense of searching for energy’s heart in Denis’ music. It’s fun with a sense of the essential, the fundamental and the flow. His take on the creative process seemed well beyond his eighteen years, but then again, he wrote his first pop song when he was ten.

Mike’s is a story of evolution from doing the brashest of things climbing and skiing 5,000–8,000-meter peaks (always within their ability and the bounds of good decision making according to Mike) to recognizing that commitment to the moment, the little things and being a great teammate were the victories and not the very top.