“Imagination” wins Best Film of Year

“Imagination” has been chosen as the “Best Film of Year” in the Action Sports category by Vimeo Staff Picks for 2017. It was selected with eight other winning films in other categories from 1200 plus Vimeo Staff Picks.

About Imagination: Tom Wallisch
Director Dave Mossop and the Sherpas Cinema crew build upon their ground-breaking “JP Auclair Street Segment” and take it to new creative heights with skier Tom Wallisch. By blending the narrative element of a kid’s imaginary slopestyle ski course with perfectly choreographed ski action from Wallisch, the town of Nelson, British Columbia turns the kid’s wildest dream into a reality as he rides in the backseat of his parent’s car.

Rooftops, railings, and town infrastructure are used like park features as Wallisch fluidly links them all together while keeping pace with the kid’s morning commute. Transferring from a swinging gate to double kink rail while narrowly missing the car, and a backflip ute grab that nods to the late JP Auclair are some of the stand out tricks from Wallisch, but it is the conceptual approach and incredible cinematic execution that made “Imagination: Tom Wallisch” stand out as the clear winner of this year’s action sports category.

Here is the original “JP Auclair Street Segment”

About the Vimeo Staff Picks “Best of the Year”
If you’re like the five of us on the Vimeo curation team, you probably spent much of 2017 struggling to avert your gaze from a seemingly endless stream of disheartening tweets and push notifications, each one reaffirming the social and political upheaval that we’re only beginning to reckon with. Natural and man-made disasters abounded in 2017, exemplified by hurricanes and gale force political headwinds, prompting many of us to take shelter, channel our inner-Marvin Gaye and ask “What’s goin’ on?”

For our team, this meant digging through the 1200+ Vimeo Staff Picks from 2017 and selecting the nine videos that spoke most to us throughout this tumultuous year. Had we made wagers prior to our lengthy deliberations, most of us would have bet that the resulting list would be dominated by nakedly polemical work, reflecting the issues that dominated the conversation this year. However, something else happened. As we put the final touches on our best-of-the-year list, we realized that our selection was decidedly micro and not macro. In lieu of sweeping topical work, we selected local, intimate stories. Somehow this makes perfect sense. While we already know the symptoms of the challenges facing the world, what’s less clear is the root cause of these challenges — and creators are clearly grappling with this very question.

Even though referencing grandiose concepts like “the human condition” usually elicits some eye rolling (ours included), it somehow feels appropriate in this case. If there’s a common thread throughout this year’s selection, it’s the way filmmakers are representing our common vulnerability as human beings and how we either cower or triumph in its face. Some of these videos demonstrate our failure to address the human condition — an animator creates an allegory about our search for fulfillment in all the wrong places, and a director captures a story about how we can sometimes undermine each other’s happiness. While other videos celebrate our collective triumph over these impulses — documentarians show amateur divers summoning the courage to leap off a ten-meter-tall tower, and a son makes a personal video about his mother summoning a different kind of courage when he moves 3,000 miles away. In all of these stories, creators are using their medium to teach us something about the origins of our collective challenges, as well as the strength in each of us that will eventually enable us to overcome.