This film has been more than three years in the making. When we met three Aussie guys who were taking on one of the world’s most well-known ultra trail-running races, we knew it’d make a fantastic film. At Broaden, we set out to make a 10-minute short film and what evolved was a story that we couldn’t have dreamt of. The brief we set ourselves was simple: tell the story of three normal guys, brought together by a love for running, who take on the ‘holy grail’ of trail running, Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc.

Crafting the documentary spanned different stages in different places:

• Interviews and races before UTMB: We followed the runners’ journey through applying for and training for UTMB. This included attending races with them in Australia, and staging a number of slow-paced interviews where we deep-dived into their history, motivations and hopes for the race
• The actual UTMB race: Shooting the race on location in Mont Blanc was an intense task. We travelled to Chamonix, France, to film the boys with their support crews before the race. The race itself took over 30 hours, which presented a technical and production feat in terms of filming and managing travel between locations as just a two-person production crew
• Editing and post-production: Bringing the whole documentary together was a labour of love. With hundreds of hours of interviews and footage of the UTMB race, we first worked to storyboard and select critical footage which served as the backbone for the story. The film was built onto this backbone, and we included press footage obtained from the race media team along with custom text, maps and graphics to provide facts and figures.

‘The Hundred Miler’ was Broaden’s first documentary and has been met with critical acclaim. We hosted a live online premier which was attended by over 1000 viewers, and since its release in April 2020 it has amassed over 200,000 views. The support for the film has in some ways been overwhelming, and perhaps the most inspiring response is to have heard from so many viewers about how the film has encouraged them to run and race more. In Summer 2020 the film was selected and screened at the International Festival of Mountain Films in Poprad, Slovakia.