EXCLUSIVE: Italy’s Be Water Film and Rai Cinema have unveiled fresh images for Daniele Vicari’s drama Bianco about an infamous 1961 mountaineering accident which happened as seven elite alpinists tried to scale Mont Blanc’s perilous central Frêney pillar.

The ambitious 11.5M euro ($13.2M) project revisits the tragedy which continues to spark debate in mountaineering circles to this day.

Alessandro Borghi (The Eight Mountains) stars as Italian alpinist Walter Bonatti who set out to conquer the pillar in July 1961 with trusted climbing partners Andrea Oggioni and Roberto Gallieni. Referred to at the time as “the last great problem”, the 800-meter (2,600 ft) vertical wall leading to Mont Blanc’s summit was the last unscaled face of Western Europe’s tallest mountain.

Part way up, they crossed paths with a French four-man rope team led by Pierre Mazeaud and including his best friend Pierre Kohlman, alongside climbing partners Robert Guillaume and Antoine Vieille, who was the youngest of the party at just 22-years old.

The teams joined forces on the final part of the ascent, but when a savage storm struck on a section known as the Chandelle, the men became trapped on the pillar for four days and nights without food, shelter, or escape.

Borghi is joined in the cast by Pierre Deladonchamps (Stranger By The Lake), Finnegan Oldfield (Alpha),  Marlon Joubert (Parthenope), Quentin Faure (Furies) Alessio Del Mastro (Mussolini: Son of the Century) and Jonas Bloquet (Sea Shadows).

The film is produced Italy’s Be Water Film with Rai Cinema, in co-production with France’s The Project Film Club and Belgium’s Tarantula. 01 Distribution will handle the Italian theatrical release.

Rai Cinema International Distribution, which is handling world sales, will unveil first footage in Cannes, with the production slated for completion in the fourth quarter of the year.

The production spent three months shooting at altitudes of between 3,000 to 3,500 meters (9,800 to 11,400 ft) close to sites of the real-life events in Italy’s Aosta Valley, with the production also recreating the pillar in three parts in a studio.

“We went as high as 3,500 metres high but we couldn’t shoot on the actual pillar because it’s just too dangerous,” said Be Water Film CEO Mattia Guerra, the former long-time Lucky Red exec who took up his role in late 2023.

Bianco is a decade-long passion project for Vicari whose previous credits include Maximum Velocity (V-Max) (2002) My Country (2006), Diaz – Don’t Clean Up This Blood (2006) and most recently Tired of Killing: Autobiography of an Assassin which premiered in Venice last year.

He co-wrote the screenplay with Massimo Gaudioso (Gomorrah, Io Capitano), Francesca Manieri (L’Immensità) and Marco Albino Ferrari, a writer specialized in mountain culture.

Key crew include long-time Vicari collaborators, cinematographer Gherardo Gossi, editor Benni Atria and set designer Marta Maffucci as well as costume designer  Emmanuele Youchnovski (The Substance). Sound is by Marc Bastien (The Great Ambition) and Franco Piscopo (A Missing Part), and the original score by Luca D’Alberto.

Belgium and France-based company Benuts (The Substance, Beating Hearts and The Three Musketeers) is overseeing the VFX.

The film marks a major step for Rome-based Be Water Film, which launched in 2021 as part of the Be Water media group, which also comprises the digital content specialist Will and podcast company Chora.

“This is our most ambitious project to date. Our long-term goal is to do make one big international project a year, and this is our first,” said Guerra.

The project chimed with Be Water Film on a number of levels.

“We believed in the screenplay and the project, but also felt it had international scope thanks to Walter Bonatti’s renown as well as the current interest in the mountains and activities such as climbing,” he said.

“Technological developments over the past decade also meant it was possible to capture the mountain backdrop in a way that would have been difficult when Daniele first started developing the project a decade ago.”