Best Overall Action Award Winner – Dream Factory Film Festival 2025 | Watch L’Experience Magnifique
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The Dream Factory was built to find the next wave of filmmakers pushing this culture forward. Year one? Straight up blew our mind.
Out of the gate, one film separated itself from the pack.
'L’expérience Magnifique' isn’t just a ski film. It’s a full-send experiment in what’s possible when you blend big-mountain skiing with speedriding in the French Alps. Carl Weiseth, Jeff Katz, and Chris Moody aren’t lapping safe zones. They’re dropping into exposed alpine faces with miniature gliders overhead, moving between snow and sky like it’s one continuous canvas.
Lines that used to be unskiable suddenly open up. Tight couloirs with mandatory cliffs turn into launch pads. Every turn carries consequence. Every glide buys access to something bigger.
Behind the lens, Ian Rinefort matched that energy shot for shot. Tracking athletes through high-speed couloirs and massive vertical terrain isn’t casual filmmaking. It’s calculated precision in a no-fall zone. The result? A visual hammer that earned the 2025 Dream Factory Full Send Award for Best Overall Action.
Sometimes it can be hard to explain what speedriding is to people.
It's a feeling of freedom, a feeling of creativity and choice.
There's going to be elements of flying, there's going to be elements of skiing, and the best lines have both.
You get to ski if it's good snow, you get to make powder turns and it's awesome.
And then when you want to ski off of an enormous cliff, you've got a wing.
Part of what makes this sport so engaging and also so intellectual is modulating your speed to match the wing and match the terrain.
Because if you go too fast, you're flying, but if you go too slow, your wing is going to collapse and then you're hosed.
So there's kind of this delicate balance where you're always trying to ride the edge of what's humanly possible without going over the edge.
It really comes down to being a combination of a high level of skiing and a high level of piloting.
And when you combine the two, you kind of get this magical new baby.
I'm Chris Moody. I have been flying for six years and I've been doing the speed riding thing pretty full on for about three.
My life has been this pursuit of making tracks in really cool places and in the last couple of years, I've been able to really go crazy with that.
I've had a couple of super memorable speed riding lines and what's going through my head is usually don't screw it up.
You need the wing to stay inflated above your head, but also you want to enjoy the amazing place that you found yourself.
So make sure you look around and breathe and enjoy it.
But also try to figure out where the best snow is and really try to put your mark on these places that maybe you've never seen ski track.
So those are usually the things going through my mind.
Yeah, I think the thing that I am most inspired from is just their dedication.
They don't take any shortcuts. You see the sensational videos that they put online.
But they come to France in December and stay until April and they are out every day, rain or shine, putting in the reps, getting as good as they possibly can.
And that's what allows them to fly the biggest, heaviest lines with so much style and just really taking the sport to another level.
My name is Jeff Katz and I've been a pilot for about 10 years.
It is kind of a one with the wing thing and that really comes from time.
It comes from spending hours and hours and hours connected to the wing and building into my body this intuitive connection with the wing.
So that when I want to go somewhere, my hands know exactly what to do.
Yeah, so when I look at a mountain, you know, you see different folds and different points of relief.
And a lot of times I imagine, you know, if someone was dropping water down from the top, how it would flow down.
And usually, you know, that's kind of an aesthetically beautiful line.
And then sometimes, you know, creativity comes in and you can think of what would happen if the water just had a little bit more energy here to like make this transition from this cool wire over to this one.
You know, if it caught some air and was able to make that transfer.
In that scenario, I am the water and that's how you make beautiful lines, I guess.
My name is Carl Weisset and I've been flying for about 10 years now.
A big part of what lets Jeff and I be out there doing what we're doing in the mountains is the bravery and the hard work and the devotion of a bunch of other European speed riding pilots
who built up this crazy little sport, who, you know, took the initial risks to figure out how this was all done and who pioneered the way for us to follow in their enormous foot or ski tracks.
The thing that inevitably keeps pulling me back to speed flying is this unique sense of exploration.
This feeling like with this little magic backpack, I'm able to go places that other people haven't ever been before.
And it's so rare to have that feeling in a world that's been so thoroughly mapped and explored at this point.
As much as I love skiing and flying new areas and discovering new things, there's this deep satisfaction that comes from mastering something that you've just like ground lapsed on.
You've really learned, you know what's coming around the corner and taking it a little bit deeper each time until you finally reach the natural conclusion.
It is a wild and spectacular feeling when you get the perfect condition of sun and snow and wind and the mountain just opens itself up to you and you're in paradise.
Only one little droplet on the lens. Maybe we got that. Maybe we nailed it. And now it's cloudy. That was the one window we had, dude. Let's go.