The Ascent

The Ascent (1994)

The real-life adventure of a dashing Italian soldier who escapes a British prisoner-of-war camp because he dreams of climbing 17,000-foot Mt. Kenya and planting the Italian flag at the summit. The obsessive British camp commander pursues him, and the two men are locked in a battle of wills, fuelled by honor and their love for the same woman.

Date of release
1994-09-15
TMDB
6.4 / 10 (5)
Runtime
1h 36m
Genres
War, Adventure
Director
Donald Shebib

Casting

Interesting facts

The Ascent is a 1994 American war adventure film directed by Donald Shebib. The film is an adaptation of a memoir by a then Italian prisoner of war in 1942 British East Africa who challenges his English captor in a climb of Mount Kenya.

Production

The Ascent is based on Felice Benuzzi's Italian war memoir, No Picnic on Mount Kenya, about a series of events that took place at Camp 354 near Nanyuki, Kenya. The story was adapted for television in 1953 as an episode of Robert Montgomery Presents. Njeri Karago is a native of Kenya who earned master's degrees from UCLA in film studies and human resource management before becoming a producer at RHI (later Hallmark Entertainment).

A climber himself, Canadian director Donald Shebib had made a mountaineering film once before, The Climb (1986), also an adaptation of a book. Shebib acknowledged that David Wiltse's script added or changed events as presented in Benuzzi's memoir.

The Ascent was shot entirely on location in Kenya. Njeri Karago "had a place" near the main location.

Principal photography took place over nineteen days, with ten days on Mount Kenya out of an intended twelve, getting up to "about 15,000 feet [5,000 meters]", Shebib remarking that he had to train and get into shape before he could direct the film. One of the crew, Rick Ridgeway, wrote the introduction for a recent edition of No Picnic on Mount Kenya.

Scenes with wild animals, such as the zebras, were filmed with the animals in their natural habitat, and with minimal contact with humans or technology.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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