Mission
Championing adventure storytelling to ignite the human spirit and catalyze community.
Vision
On the edge between desire and fear, between the known and the unknown, is a place deep inside us all where the spirit is transformed — pushed beyond its limit by our deliberate commitment to usher in something new and original. In this soulful place we are catalyzed to learn, expand and engender newfound understanding to inspire others on their journeys.
The five points
Commitment - To overcome fear and give ourselves completely to the challenge at hand while leading a vital existence and never allowing ourselves to become complacent.
Respect - For the wildness within and beyond our human form, for the experience and the knowledge we inherit from those who inspire and teach us.
Humility - To forge the courage and the discipline to listen to our intuition, not our ego, always mindful of our place in the natural order.
Purpose - To possess the motivation and conviction necessary to pursue our highest aspirations in the face of adversity.
Balance - To maintain our energy and focus while the things we cannot control inevitably shift around us.
our origin story
In 2007, Julie Kennedy was living in Carbondale, Colorado – a place she would later describe as having more heart, soul, and authenticity than anywhere she'd traveled. She ran Climbing Magazine while raising a family in a community built around exploring the depths of wild places. But she had a growing conviction that the adventure film world, as it existed, was leaving something essential on the table.
That August, over breakfast with Yvon Chouinard, she blurted out that she wanted to create something meaningful – a film festival, but not like the ones that already existed, something that understood adventure not as spectacle but as transformation. Her vision, in her own words: “to provide a forum where filmmakers, innovators and members of the community at large can gather together, share their films and ideas, build relationships and come away transformed by the experience. It is a brief moment in time when the right people come together in the right place, supported by the right creative stimulation to make real change." Chouinard's response was immediate: Why don't you just create it, and I'll pay for it? Patagonia became the founding Partner. 5Point was born.
The name came from climbing. Named for the fifth-class grading system used by climbers, the festival was built on five guiding principles: respect, commitment, humility, purpose, and balance. This was not banal marketing language, this was Kennedy's attempt to articulate what she believed distinguished meaningful adventure from mere thrill-seeking – the interior qualities that had to be present for an experience in the wild to actually change you. "I believe in order to do the kind of adventures we all do – skiing, climbing, kayaking, surfing, whatever – it stuck to me that those five principles have to be embedded in our adventures, otherwise there's no real reason to do them – because really, they're what it's all about," she said.
From the beginning, Kennedy was impatient with films that showed, as she put it, bros ripping it up on the slopes. By the second year she was highly selective, looking for something harder to define and more difficult to make – stories that carried genuine weight, that had been built from real encounters with the unknown. When programming a film night she was looking to take the audience on an emotional roller coaster: "pure joy, fear, sadness, humor – really getting their palms sweaty." Not stimulation for its own sake, but the full range of what it feels like to be human and alive.
Since 2007, 5Point has forged a place in the industry where adventure is more than adrenaline and stories that catalyze the human spirit are championed. Beyond the annual Flagship Festival, 5Point develops and delivers programming to students year round, based on the belief that adventure, pursued deliberately, transforms – and that spirit swells when shared.
