JACKSON, WY— The 2018 Olympic Games are coming to an end, but local film maker Phil Hessler has created a series of films that will allow the legacy to live on.
The “Far From Home” series is a six episode douc-series that highlights the Olympic Games’ most “unlikely” athletes. Most come from countries that hardly ever see snow or cold weather, like Shiva Keshavan, the luge racer from India who trains on steep highways; or Jazmine Fenalator and Carrie Russell, the real life “Cool Runnings” Jamaican bobsled team.
All had to overcome Olympic-sized adversities to make it to PyeongChang at all, like Forough Abbasi, the Iranian ski racer who, with her father’s support, became the first Iranian woman to compete in two consecutive Olympic games.
“Far From Home” began as a full-length film about Hessler’s brother, Brolin Mawejje, and his journey to become the first Ugandan snowboarder in the winter Olympics. Health problems kept Mawejje out of this year’s Olympics, but the idea of telling similar stories started to spread, Hessler said.
“What if we had six athletes who have to face all these cultural hurtles or financial hurtles to even practice their sport,” Hessler wondered.
Turns out, there were plenty of athletes to choose from. But Hessler’s first hurdle was finding a network interested in the series. He pitched it for a year with no success. Finally, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) started their own Olympic channel and started to develop their own original content. Hessler pitched the series to the committee, and they bit.
What followed were six hectic months of traveling to 12 different countries to shoot the episodes. The connections had already been made—Phil and his 20-person team started talking to the athletes a year before they started shooting. And the athletes were thrilled to share their stories.
“A lot of these athletes don’t have a lot of funding, support, or sponsors,” Hessler said. “They’re doing sports that aren’t very popular in their countries.”
All six episodes of the series were split up and distributed across three different platforms: the series debuted in a series of three-to-four minute Snapchat episodes. Sorry, the Snapchat series is already lost in cyber-space, but there are two more opportunities to watch. Nine-minute episodes are now all live OlympicChannel.com. The longest episodes, each around 30 minutes, will be delivered to the Olympic Channel in April—exact dates TBD. The Olympic Channel still has to decide what to do with them, but they will likely air on one of their TV partners like NBC (jury’s still out on whether Jackson’s Charter/Spectrum customers will be able to watch it by then).
None of this would have been possible, Hessler said, without the outpouring of support from his home community in Jackson. Reactions to the first film “really instilled a sense of confidence that we could do this again,” Hessler said. “I’m extremely grateful to all of the people that have been part of this journey.”
