This fall, Max is finishing up a 38-minute documentary called Camp Courage, about a Ukrainian woman in her sixties named Olga who accompanies her 13-year-old granddaughter, Milana, to a rock-climbing camp in the Austrian Alps after they were made refugees by the war. The real question is: Can he apply the raw talent on display in that film to stories other than his own? He’s not going to let this singular drama define him any longer. It won an award for best feature at Canada’s Banff Centre Mountain Film Festival, and grand prize at the Kendal Mountain Festival in England.īut Max doesn’t want to hang his hat on Torn. National Geographic commissioned the film with a $1.4 million budget, and it received a standing ovation when it premiered at the Telluride Film Festival. Torn was brilliantly crafted and critically acclaimed. It is to date his most significant work, a defining project that introduced Max Lowe to the world. Torn told the story from a new vantage: that of a son. This oft repeated tale of love and loss in the mountains has shaped Max’s life. These days, when Max and his brothers talk about their dad, it’s not Alex they’re referring to, it’s Anker. Anker and Jenni have been married for 22 years now. Jenni and Anker married two years later, and Anker later adopted her three sons as his own. After his death, Jenni grew close to Alex’s best friend and climbing partner, alpinist Conrad Anker, who had narrowly survived the Shishapangma avalanche. Their bodies were not recovered at the time of the accident.Īlex left behind his wife, Jenni, and their three boys: Max, then ten, Sam, seven, and Isaac, three. On October 5, 1999, Alex, then 40, died, along with cameraman David Bridges, in an avalanche on the south face of 26,335-foot Shishapangma in Tibet. As the story goes, Max’s father, Alex Lowe, was one of the most decorated climbers of his era, with notable first ascents from the Himalayas to Antarctica. In fall 2021, Max debuted his biggest and most personal project to date: Torn, a feature-length documentary about his family’s legendary past and his place in it. Army vets going back to Iraq for a ski expedition, and the quirky culture of slacklining. He has directed shorts on polar bears in the Arctic, migratory raptors in the West, U.S. Max, who’s 34, works as a freelance filmmaker, mostly directing documentaries that sit either squarely in or adjacent to the adventure world. Max loves to cook, but I’m not here to talk about food. Jenni points out bleeding hearts, catmint, and lupines, while Max serves us heaping plates of mushroom larb with fresh mint, steamed rice flecked with sesame seeds, sautéed Broccolini, and those slow-cooked short ribs, a touch on the tough side but soaked in a pleasing gingery soy marinade. Max and Lia’s yard is leafy and lush, dotted with flowers and wooden fairy houses left over from the previous owner.
It has robin’s-egg blue walls and a tiny twin bed that’s hard to believe could ever have fit Max, who at six feet five inches is towering over the table.
The room where she paints bright, textured canvases of bears and honeybees was Max’s childhood bedroom. She lives across the street in the same craftsman where Max grew up. Jenni, now in her late sixties, is an artist with a long, gray braid and a thing for wildflowers. Max’s mom, Jennifer Lowe-Anker, has arrived for dinner carrying salad in a wooden bowl. I’m sitting at a table in Max’s backyard in Bozeman, Montana, at the house he shares with his fiancée, a sunshiny nurse named Lia Argyrakis.
“Sorry, I forgot to turn the oven down,” he says glumly. He announces this before I’ve taken my first bite.
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