La Traversée Sagittaire: Raphaëlle Damilano and the Himalaya as Inheritance

In her first film, Raphaëlle Damilano heads to the Himalaya with her father and her uncle, the French alpinist François Damilano. Vertige Media watched the film, then sat down with the director. Behind the expedition, what emerges on screen is a story about family, grief, and inheritance.

© La Traversée Sagittaire

On paper, La Traversée Sagittaire could look like a fairly classic mountain film: five weeks on expedition, a 20,000-foot peak, Nepal, altitude, camps, weather calling the shots, and crevasses reminding everyone that the margin for error does not care what you are going through. But very quickly, Raphaëlle Damilano’s camera turns away from that script. What she films is not a conquest of the high peaks, or even a straightforward alpine adventure. It is the invisible weight of a family name, in a lineage where the mountains were never just a vacation backdrop.

The Damilano Family

To understand the film, you first have to look at the rope team—the climbers tied together on the mountain. There is Jean-René, Raphaëlle’s father. There is François Damilano, her uncle, a major figure in French alpinism and ice climbing. And there is Raphaëlle herself: daughter, niece, Paris-based stage actor, about to climb her first Himalayan summit.

“I had this feeling that I was really carrying grief in my backpack”

Raphaëlle Damilano

In the Damilano family, the high mountains did not arrive by accident. Raphaëlle describes a childhood shaped by Chamonix, family holidays, expedition stories, images brought home by her father and uncle, the French Alpine Club traces left by her grandparents, slide shows, and alpine figures moving through the family’s shared memory. “It’s really a family relationship,” she says. Later, she puts it more sharply: “I do think there’s a kind of cult around it.” She is not saying this as an attack on her family. She is naming the density of an inheritance. What you receive with love can also become a quiet demand.

Then, at the very beginning of the trip, something happens that no one could have written into the story. On the first day of the expedition, after arriving in Dolpo, a region of the Nepalese Himalaya, Raphaëlle learns that her grandfather Raoul has died. Getting back to France in time for the funeral is impossible. The expedition continues, but it is no longer about the same thing. When we speak, she returns to that moment without trying to make it prettier than it was: “I had this feeling that I was really carrying grief in my backpack.” Then, later: “I think it changed everything.” From that point on, walking is no longer just movement toward a point on a map. It becomes a way of moving forward with what has just disappeared.

A Mountain Film That Looks Away From the Summit

That is where La Traversée Sagittaire clearly breaks from the usual grammar of the mountain film. The summit is there, of course, but it quickly stops being the center of the story. The film prefers the edges: hesitation, shaky footage, scenes staged after the fact, a recorded therapy session, family archives, letters left behind in Paris, a visit to her grandmother, small mistakes that end up saying more than clean, polished shots ever could.

Raphaëlle Damilano makes no secret of the fact that the film was built backward. She left without a clear script, thinking at first that she would bring back images from an unlikely trip. Once back in France, she came down hard. “I didn’t want to make a mountain vacation film.” So she let the material sit for two years.

“I think it’s a form of recognition for everything this family inheritance gave me”

Raphaëlle Damilano

The film truly came alive in the edit, with Delphine Dufriche, who had already worked on a film by François Damilano. The detail matters. Here again, the family returns through a side door. It is this editor who helps Raphaëlle understand that the subject is not Nepal, not performance, not even the expedition itself, but her own place inside the story.

That late construction gives the film its unusual shape: part self-portrait, part altitude story, part family essay, part theatrical experiment. The astrologer almost plays the role of a Greek chorus. Raphaëlle owns that influence: “Because I come from theater, I’m very influenced by it. I’m moved by Greek tragedies.”

Not the Finish, the Search

The film could have slipped into oversharing, or into a family score-settling exercise. It does neither. Raphaëlle Damilano is not trying to kill the father, knock the uncle off his pedestal, or put her inheritance on trial. She simply moves the question onto her own ground: cinema, theater, looking.

“I think it’s a form of recognition for everything this family inheritance gave me,” she tells us, before adding that there was also “something to unload.” That is the film in one line. La Traversée Sagittaire is not about how you become an alpinist in a family of alpinists. It is about what it means to inherit a passion that feels too large for you, and how you find a way to keep it from speaking in your place.

In the end, the planned summit is not reached. Another peak, around 20,000 feet, becomes the high point instead. But by then, the film has already changed the measure of success. Raphaëlle Damilano has made less a story of conquest than a passage film: imperfect, funny, restrained, and guided by the sense that even the most beautiful inheritances sometimes need to be set down, at least a little. “It’s a kind of quest,” she says. “It isn’t resolved.”

What remains now is to see where this crossing can go next. Raphaëlle Damilano does not hide the fact that the life of the film is partly out of her hands. A production company is now helping send it to festivals, with the hope that it can eventually be shown more widely. “I’d like it to be seen,” she says, while acknowledging that the film is an unusual object, hard to place in any simple box. In that sense, it keeps moving the way it was made: not in a perfectly straight line, but with enough direction to make you want to follow.