Fortune - A Short Ski Film By Hadley Hammer & Sophie Danison
It is questioned if skiing is an art or a sport. But for Hadley Hammer, there’s a third option—skiing is an act of play. It is movement detached from productivity. It is expression untethered from metrics. A chance to interact with your surroundings, with your friends, with your insides.
Photo by Sophie Danison
In the winter of 2023, Hadley Hammer and Sophie Danison set out to make a film about the feeling of weightlessness when powder skiing. They deemed Japan as the perfect place to find the play with gravity. What they found instead was three weeks of dry weather.
Photo by Sophie Danison
At the end of the trip, Hadley drew a fortune from a drawer at a famous Buddhist temple in the middle of Tokyo. The fortune was the “best” one could possibly receive from the thousands available. The fortune reminded her that to see her fortune, she must look closer.
Photo by Sophie Danison
In the absence of snow they had found other forms of beauty—air so cold it made the sky sparkle, fish so good it made their mouths tickle, water so warm it soothed their zapped nervous systems. They had been fortunate to experience those three weeks in Japan.
Photo by Sophie Danison
After 13 years of skiing professionally, Hammer decided to retire from performance-based skiing in January of 2025. Looking back at her career, the emotion that surfaced is one of gratitude. Gratitude for all the places and faces skiing brought her. Gratitude for the experiences and emotions had. Gratitude for the beauty and wonder seen. There were peaks and valleys—emotionally and physically. Dark nights and cold days endured. Failed summits and first descents skied. And it is the accumulation of all of it that made her career so rich.
Photo by Sophie Danison
And it’s the return to skiing as play that makes the future so appealing.
Fortune is a short film—an incantation to see our own fortune by observing closely the beauty of the world around you.
A reminder that we are so damn lucky to get to ski.
And a thank you, to the act of skiing and the fullness of the experience it brings.
Photo by Sophie Danison
Filmed & Edited by: Sophie Danison
Script & Skiing by: Hadley Hammer
Presented by: The North Face, Smith Optics, Line Skis