Filmmaker Thibaut Marot thought he was making a climbing film.
He wasn’t.
When Marot followed Laura Pineau and Kate Kelleghan into Yosemite to document their attempt at the legendary Triple Crown — linking El Capitan, Half Dome, and Mount Watkins in a single 24-hour push — he expected to capture performance. Grit. Vertical granite at its most punishing. The kind of footage that makes your palms sweat just watching it.
What he found instead was something he couldn’t look away from: the raw, unguarded truth of two people trusting each other with their lives.
“There was something between them,” he recalls.
That something became the film.
Opposites on the Wall
Laura Pineau is fire — expressive, relentless, always moving, always talking. Kate Kelleghan is stillness — quiet, introspective, someone who thinks carefully before she speaks. On flat ground, those differences might seem minor, maybe even charming. But hundreds of metres up a sheer granite face, after sixteen hours of climbing with burning forearms and no sleep, with nothing between you and the valley floor but a rope and your trust in each other?
Those differences become everything.
What makes The Queen Swing so compelling — and so unlike most adventure films you’ll see — is that Marot isn’t interested in pretending the partnership is seamless. It isn’t. Laura craves connection and conversation; Kate sometimes needs space and silence. On the wall, those needs collide. There are moments of miscommunication, frustration, the kind of friction that only surfaces when people are truly pushed to their limit.
But instead of fracturing them, those moments refine them. Kate’s calm, measured presence grounds the team when momentum threatens to spiral. Laura’s energy pulls them forward when exhaustion makes stopping feel like the only option. Together, they find a rhythm — imperfect, honest, and entirely their own.
“They served up their relationship on a silver platter,” Marot says.
The Camera That Got Close
Marot’s greatest challenge on this film wasn’t the terrain, though hauling equipment up thousand-metre walls while trying to find the right angle is no small feat. His real challenge was proximity — being close enough to capture something intimate without disturbing the very thing he was trying to film.
He describes himself as needing to be like “a little mouse” on the wall. Always observing. Never interfering.
And because Yosemite’s strict regulations prohibit drones, and because Marot was working solo — repositioning constantly, carrying only what he could physically haul — he had to be ruthlessly selective about what he captured. No sweeping aerial shots. No glamorous wide angles that smooth over the difficulty. Instead, what you get is something far more powerful: closeness.
The exhaustion etched into Laura’s face after a brutal pitch. The quiet composure in Kate’s eyes when things get hard. The shared glance between two people who no longer need words to understand each other.
It’s the kind of footage that makes you feel like you’re on the wall with them — not watching from a safe distance, but embedded in the experience, feeling its weight, its tension, its small and enormous breakthroughs.
Strength in the Smallest Moments
For an audience used to high-octane climbing content, The Queen Swing takes a deliberately different path. Marot consistently prioritises the transitions — the moments between pitches, the check-ins, the quiet encouragements — over the climbing itself. Not because the climbing isn’t extraordinary. It is. But because it’s in those in-between spaces that the real story lives.
In one moment near the 17-hour mark, completely spent, running on fumes and sheer will, the two women pause briefly to check their hair. It’s fleeting, almost playful — and somehow, it says everything. They are not symbols of toughness or reduced to athletic achievement. They are fully, unapologetically human. Strong and tired and funny and real, all at once.
That’s the heartbeat of this film.
Fatigue strips away every filter. There’s no room for performance when you’re physically and mentally depleted. What remains is honesty — sometimes uncomfortable, always real — and it’s in that honesty that Laura and Kate’s partnership becomes something genuinely moving to witness.
Why You Need to See This
Yes, the Triple Crown is the goal. Yes, the scale of what they’re attempting is immense — one of the most demanding objectives in big wall climbing, attempted by very few and completed by even fewer women. The ambition alone is worth the price of admission.
But by the time the credits roll, you may have forgotten to care whether they finish it.
What stays with you is the partnership. The way trust is built not in grand gestures but in small, repeated moments of choosing each other. The way two people who are fundamentally different learn — slowly, imperfectly, honestly — to move as one.
Adventure, The Queen Swing reminds us, isn’t just about what you achieve. It’s about who you become in the process, and who you become it with.
Laura and Kate’s climb is extraordinary.
But their connection? That’s what makes it unforgettable.
Catch The Queen Swing on the big screen at the Gutsy Girls Adventure Film Tour — coming to a city near you soon!
Get your tickets here: https://gutsygirlsadventurefilmtour.co.nz/tickets/
Follow Laura Pineau, Kate Kelleghan and filmmaker Thibaut Marot on Instagram to see their ongoing achievements in this space.
