Weekends, the award-winning film director hunts adventure stories in the mountains.
Kowalski (33) was in Wanaka this weekend for the world premiere of his film, Changabang: Return to the Shining Mountain, which won the New Zealand Mountain Film Festival’s Hiddleston/MacQueen award ($2500) for best-made New Zealand film.
Another of his films, Enchainment, was this year’s best film on climbing.
Both films involved members of the New Zealand Alpine Team, who gave Kowalski access to their GoPro footage to create and develop the stories.
Ever since 2021, when Kowalski’s first-ever film for the big screen, Newton Peak, won the festival’s grassroots award ($500), he had felt film-making would be a promising career.
Kowalski was not a creative writing or broadcasting student.
He earned his creative chops studying photography and arts and was now enrolled in an online film course, run from Canada.
Very recently, he had invested in a new camera, replacing his faithful Panasonic and moving forward with a Sony FX6.
"I feel it is great, because it is more about the stories.
"If you have a fantastic story, it doesn’t matter which camera you film it on.
"And in a small country with fewer degrees of separation, you have amazing access to and can meet all these amazing people."
The mountain was first climbed by a British quartet led by Sir Chris Bonington.
The Brits ascended by the east ridge in 1974 and published a book about the adventure called Changabang.
Two years later, the west wall was conquered by a British two-man expedition, Peter Boardman and Joe Tasker, who travelled light. Their book was called Shining Mountain.
It was 46 years and more than 20 attempts by others before the New Zealand Alpine Team trio succeeded on the west wall.
Kowalski said the stories were "intrinsically linked".
"The original ascentionists were revolutionary, ground-breaking.
"It had allure, it is an incredibly difficult mountain to climb.
"All these people had gone and failed.
"These guys had gone and succeeded — so the question was why?
"What was it that made them different to all the others who tried and failed?" he said.
During the making of the film, Kowalski travelled to the United Kingdom to interview the families and friends of the originals.
Enchainment also tells an epic New Zealand climbing story, of Christchurch mountaineer Alastair McDowell’s linked climb of 24 Southern Alps peaks.
Kowalski approached him to ask if he could tell his story.
"I knew he would have all the GoPro footage and I knew how to compress and stitch all together.
"He had the raw moments but the story was a bigger thing", Kowalski said.
Kowalski’s next films will be micro-documentaries.
One will be about ultramarathoner Chris Moresley; the other about Christchurch climber Nick Allan.
