BY KAREN BOSSICK

As a self-professed terrain park rat growing up in Massachusetts, JP Dellanno used to make “silly little edits” with his “ancient” GoPro and dubstep music that he confesses didn’t age well. But, following a stint at a California film school, he found his calling—real-sized mountains covered with snow.

Dellanno edited a film called “Eagle Pass” for Yu Sasaki, a Freeride World Tour competitor who throws massive 360s with creative lines, that won an award from “Outside” Magazine. And this past year he created “Home from Home,” a film that captures the lives and hearts of some of the best Japanese freeride skiers in the world.

The film found its way onto the Banff Centre Mountain Film Festival World Tour. And on Saturday, Feb. 1, Dellanno will fly in from Los Angeles to be here when his film is shown at the Sun Valley Opera House as part of Sun Valley’s three-day Banff Film Festival.

“His movie, very artsy in its own right, explores the intersection between Japanese athletes and the natural world.  It is exciting, as it is not the typical huckfest ski flick we see so often,” said Michael Boge, who brings the Banff films to Sun Valley every winter.

Dellanno was a freelance cinematographer when he became “super fascinated” with the Japanese freeride ski scene.

“I reached out to these skiers to get a better understanding of the scene and became good friends with Yu Sasaki,” he recounted. “A couple years ago, he tore his Achilles tendon and so we made a documentary about his road to recovery from such a traumatic injury and it won the award from Outside Magazine in 2020.”

Sasaki, who has since moved to Revelstoke, B.C., where he drives his food truck around the Canadian Rockies serving Japanese food to mountain bikers during summer, invited Dellanno to Japan to work on a film showcasing the backcountry skiing in the Japanese Alps around Hakuba, Japan.

It meant that Dellanno had to learn to backcountry ski and become educated in avalanche safety.

“But I was driven to make the film because a lot of these athletes don’t get the same kind of coverage in the media that western athletes do, despite a cult-like following.”

While Japan is known for its deep powder snow, the winter Dellanno went to film was one of the worst with scarce snow.

“We had two days to get the shots we needed and it was trying as we had only a 10-minute window each run to get the footage we wanted. We could only get one to two runs in a day because we had to hike back up after we finished one so the shooting ratio was such a shock to me.”

Dellanno and his crew worked on pure passion without much money to back them.

“It was perhaps the scrappiest project I’ve been a part of and our crew effectively volunteered their time for two weeks in order to create this with me.  The intensity with which they worked and the dedication the team shows was a testament to how much they cared about making a good film at the end of the day.”

Dellanno plans to return to Japan in February to shoot a profile of one of Japan’s most notable, unique Japanese snowboarders and his place in the community.

“This time I’m going to have to learn some Japanese as he doesn’t know much English,” he said. “But ‘Home from Home’ has driven a fire in me to do more and more.”

IF YOU GO:

Twenty-one films will be shown Friday through Sunday, Jan. 31-Feb. 2, during the Banff Centre Mountain Film Festival World Tour. The films start at 7 p.m. each night at the Sun Valley Opera House.

Tickets are $25 in advance, available at at https://www.showpass.com/banff-centre-mountain-film-festival-world-tour-2/. They’re $30 at the door. This year, for the first time, ticket purchasers have the opportunity to save by buying a three-day festival pass.

To see each night’s lineup, see Eye on Sun Valley’s Jan. 16 story “Banff Film Festival to Take Viewers to Karakoram Mountains, Jamaican Cliffs and Mount Washington” at https://eyeonsunvalley.com/Story_Reader/12464/Banff-Film-Festival-to-Take-Viewers-to-Karakoram-Mountains,-Jamaican-Cliffs-and-Mount-Washington/

“Home from Home” will be shown Saturday night at the Sun Valley Opera House. COURTESY: JP Dellanno