Carving new paths: ‘Champions of the Golden Valley’ screens at 5Point Film Festival

Like many projects born out of passion, “Champions of the Golden Valley” — a feature film screening at this year’s 5Point Film Festival — transformed into something far more powerful and complex than director Ben Sturgulewski ever anticipated.

In 2019, the seasoned adventure film director traveled to Afghanistan to witness the Afghan Ski Challenge, an annual backcountry ski race organized by the Bamyan Ski Club and Alishah Farhang, who nearly became Afghanistan’s first Olympic skier. 

Sturgulewski, already well-versed in how mountain communities connect through snow sports, found more than a competition in Bamyan. Instead, he found a celebration of peace among rival villages and a shared, undiluted love of skiing unlike anything he had seen before. 

“In Afghanistan, that pure joy for skiing was just so alive and well. They don’t have many resources over there, so they were just doing it in their own way with the resources they had on hand — they would make their own skis out of two-by-fours and wooden planks and milk jug bindings, and they would just march up the mountains right behind their homes and go skiing to get through these long winters…” Sturgulewski said. “In contrast to many ski cultures, where it’s all about the newest stuff and the nicest gear and it’s almost this status symbol, I think there, it really felt like this pure encapsulation of the most joyful, pure heart of skiing.”

Six weeks after Sturgulewski completed the initial 40-minute cut, the Taliban captured Afghanistan’s capital city, Kabul, and declared an “interim government” in August 2021. 

That’s when Sturgulewski and Katie Stjernholm, the film’s producer, embarked on a very different mission: helping members of the Bamyan ski community evacuate the country. 

“It was honestly the most trying and difficult three weeks of our lives,” Sturgulewski said. “We were oftentimes working 20-plus hours a day, on the phone constantly with people in Afghanistan, working remotely…with (non-governmental organizations), volunteer veterans, politicians, anyone that we could find who could help.

“We started entering these rooms where people were getting things done and ultimately, we were successful in helping get out a pretty large number of people, largely to Germany,” he added.

It took months for the filmmakers to return to the project. 

“It made us reflect on this idea of like, okay, what’s our obligation to telling the story now? What does the story mean?” Sturgulewski said. “It made us reevaluate everything about this project down to its core and realize that we had a responsibility to rebuild it and to reshape it into this new narrative — it was one thing, about this joy of skiing, this beautiful skiing community, but it became this other story about the refugee experience and what our subjects went through.”

Now a global impact campaign and full-length, award-winning documentary, “Champions of the Golden Valley” follows the Bamyan skiers from their joyous time together on the slopes to the heartbreak of displacement as they, like more than eight million other Afghans, became refugees scattered around the world. 

“It’s this window into the refugee experience that I think is really unique because we had the opportunity to capture the lives of this community before they lost so much of what they had built,” Sturgulewski said. “Then we also documented the latter half of that experience, so that allows the audience to see what was lost.”

Like fellow 5Point Film Festival feature “Row of Life,” the documentary is a glimpse into the unexpected moments that reveal our shared humanity. 

“In narrative filmmaking, where there’s a script and there’s actors, you can control every detail of what happens…and a documentary, it’s real life and you’re pointing a camera and witnessing what’s unfolding and life is unpredictable,” Stjernholm said. “I’ve had another film where a subject passed away in the middle of filming and you just have to pivot and adapt. I think that’s why a documentary can be so relatable and why it can really make an impact and make change — because it’s real life, it’s what happens to people and it’s following their journey and you get inspired by people’s courage and resilience.

“It’s not made up, this really happened and this is how people responded to it,” she added. “And I think people can take away a lot from that.”

“Champions of the Golden Valley” screens at the 2025 5Point Film Festival at 3 p.m. Friday, April 25 at the Crystal Theatre, 427 Main St., Carbondale. Admission is free and first-come, first-served.