If you’re not a particular kind of mountain sports nerd, you might not be familiar with the Banff Centre Mountain Film Festival World Tour. But for people who live their lives in the overlapping circles of outdoor and adventure sports, environmental and conservation sciences, and nonfiction storytelling, it’s a touchstone. The parent festival has been held in Banff, Alberta, for decades—it will celebrate its 50th anniversary later this year—and the tour brings a tight selection of the featured films to more than 40 countries every year.
Barring a true outlier like Free Solo, which made it all the way to the Oscars, getting on the Banff world tour is about as big as it gets in this corner of the filmmaking world. So it meant a lot when 600 people packed into the largest theater at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity on a Thursday evening last October to watch the world premiere of For Winter, a feature-length documentary from the National Geographic Society’s acclaimed Impact Story Lab.
The film followed Dr. Alison Criscitiello, an ice core scientist, mountaineer, and National Geographic Explorer, as she attempted to lead a team up Canada’s highest peak. Ice cores, shafts of ancient ice drilled out of glaciers, contain invaluable climate records in their layers, and cores from the shrinking glaciers in high alpine environments (as opposed to, say, the lower-lying areas of the Antarctic ice cap) are among the most difficult for scientists to acquire. On 19,500-foot Mount Logan, Criscitiello’s team was going after an unprecedented, record-setting core—they would ultimately succeed in drilling the deepest ever non-polar ice core in the world, at 327 meters. But they wouldn’t get there without paying a price: Multiple expedition members fell ill and were medevacked off the mountain by helicopter as the rest made their way higher, skiing uphill, hauling gear, and acclimating as they went.
The film was stunning; the aerial shots of the Yukon’s glaciated mountains were breathtaking. The team’s efforts over the fraught 10-day ascent and 16 days of around-the-clock drilling on the summit plateau were gripping. Throughout the film, Criscitiello wrestled on camera with her many obligations: to her team, to science and the planet’s rapidly changing climate, and to her wife Amy and daughter Winter, back home—the ones who would be most brutally affected if something went wrong.
After the credits rolled and the audience stood to cheer, Criscitiello joined the film’s director of photography, Leo Hoorn, and two of its producers, National Geographic staffers Taylor Schuelke and Vanessa Serrao, for a conversation on stage. There, Criscitiello acknowledged that sharing the personal parts of her story wasn’t always comfortable for her, but she’d been persuaded that it was important for the film that she open up beyond the science. One of the staffers pointed out that because For Winter had been produced directly by the National Geographic Society, the non-profit organization that owns a stake in the various Nat Geo-branded for-profit ventures, it would be made widely available for screenings—in schools, for instance. In the audience, I pictured a generation of girls and queer kids watching For Winter and feeling a world of possibilities opening up to them.
Did I cry repeatedly throughout the screening and the Q&A? You bet. Did I stream the film on the festival’s online platform, this time with my wife, when I got home to Whitehorse? I sure did—and we both cried then, too. When I heard that For Winter had been selected for the 2025 edition of the Banff World Tour, I looked forward to pestering everyone I knew to go see it when the tour passed through their town.
But, in the days right after Donald Trump’s inauguration, every one of the film’s hundreds of planned screenings worldwide was abruptly canceled. Soon after, all mentions of For Winter were scrubbed from the Impact Story Lab’s website. Even a trailer for the film that was still watchable on Vimeo when I started working on this story is now gone. When I first wrote to National Geographic in mid-March to ask what had happened, I received a one-line statement in reply:
"The National Geographic Society has made the decision to no longer air the film."
It wasn’t just me who couldn’t find any answers about why the film has vanished. Crew members who worked on the project, scientists and athletes who were featured in it, and organizers at venues that had planned to screen For Winter have all been left without any clear explanation. Eventually, National Geographic offered a few words beyond that initial one-liner. In multiple communications to me and others, they’ve repeated the phrase “something came to light that was relevant to the film,” with no further explanation. What could’ve prompted them to torch their own work, after it had already reached the heights of their industry?
There are multiple organizations broadly known as “National Geographic,” so before we go any further, let’s run through some definitions and distinctions. In 2018, Disney bought a majority stake in an entity called National Geographic Partners, LLC—or NGP, for short. This is the for-profit company that encompasses the magazine, the television channel, and other properties that live under the Nat Geo brand. It was formed in 2015 by then–majority partner 21st Century Fox and the 137-year-old National Geographic Society. The Society is a registered non-profit organization, and it remains a 27 percent-owner of NGP, even after Fox’s sale of its 73-percent share to Disney. When I refer to “National Geographic” in this story, I mean the National Geographic Society unless otherwise specified.
(I have been paid to write for National Geographic magazine as recently as April of this year. I have also in the past been a secondary beneficiary of a field reporting grant from the National Geographic Society.)
In addition to its stake in NGP, the society runs programming of its own. That includes, most prominently, its “Explorers” program, which offers grants and other support to a wide array of adventurers, storytellers, activists, and scientists. For example, the society’s 2023 annual report notes that National Geographic supported more than 700 Explorer projects in 83 countries that year, with an average of $240,000 disbursed per Explorer. The society also runs the Impact Story Lab, which describes itself as “an award-winning creative unit” that “collaborates with National Geographic Explorers to produce film, video, audio, photography, VR/AR experiences, and other media.”
That 2023 annual report, uploaded to its website in October of 2024, defines the society’s mission as using “the power of science, exploration, education, and storytelling to illuminate and protect the wonder of the world.” The same report touted the society’s “commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion,” noting that those values are “at the heart of all we do.” That language was echoed in its 2023 Form 990, filed with the IRS in May 2024. In a line item about its “program service accomplishments,” the society described its storytelling and outreach team as supporting efforts to “amplify voices historically underrepresented in the media.”
For Winter sure would seem to embody those values. It featured genuinely groundbreaking science, done in harrowing conditions. Its focus on Criscitiello’s motherhood, set against the stakes of her work, lent an emotional depth often lacking in the typical mountain sports doc. “For Winter is much more than an expedition film,” Vanessa Serrao, vice president of the Impact Story Lab and executive producer on the film, said at the Banff premiere. As Steve Andrews, a freelancer who worked on it as a sound recordist, put it: It was “such a good, important story from so many angles: climate science, having a queer woman leading a group of dudes into dangerous territory[.]”
The film was broadly typical of an Impact Story Lab collaboration: a Nat Geo film featuring a National Geographic Explorer on an expedition funded, at least in part, by Nat Geo. In the society’s 2022 annual report, released in the summer of 2023, the Mount Logan expedition received a shoutout under the heading “Expanding the Boundaries of Knowledge”:
In May 2022, during a National Geographic and Rolex Perpetual Planet Mount Logan Expedition, Explorer Alison Criscitiello extracted a record 372-meter (1,072-foot) ice core from Mount Logan, the tallest mountain in Canada. The ice core contains an estimated 30,000 years’ worth of climate records that can be used to better understand and mitigate the impact of climate change on glacier melt.
The film premiered in Banff, went on to the Vancouver International Mountain Film Festival, and in late January it was already on the road as part of the world tour. Then something changed. In Edmonton, Criscitiello’s home base, a science center called Telus World of Science had planned an IMAX screening of the film on Feb. 11, to celebrate the 10th annual International Day of Women and Girls in Science. But on Jan. 31, they were told that the film had been pulled.
“We were disappointed that we were unable to share For Winter with our guests,” Kyla Amrhein, the center’s director of marketing and community relations, told me. “However, we are excited to continue to profile Alison along with other local researchers and scientists at the science center.”
For the Banff Centre Mountain Film Festival World Tour, it wasn’t as simple as canceling a one-off screening. For Winter was one part of a larger package of films scheduled for hundreds of screenings in locations around the world. It would need to be removed from the roster and replaced. National Geographic informed Banff of the decision to pull the film on Jan. 28, according to an employee there, and Banff replied that they would need at least a week to adjust their programming. The same source noted that while films being pulled from the tour is not unheard of, it is also “not common.”
“After a vibrant and sold-out premiere of For Winter in Banff last year, we were confused and surprised to hear about the film’s sudden withdrawal from our World Tour,” Joanna Croston, director of the Banff Centre Mountain Film and Book Festival, told me. “National Geographic has always been a brilliant partner of ours, submitting some of the top adventure documentaries in our film competition each year. The removal of For Winter from our World Tour without much explanation certainly caught us off guard.”
Around the same time, National Geographic was making some other noteworthy changes. Since 2021, a woman named Shannon Bartlett has been the National Geographic Society’s lead on DEI. She was identified—on the society’s website and in its May 2024 IRS filings—as the society’s chief diversity, equity, and inclusion officer, and was counted as a member of its executive team. As of Jan. 29 of this year, according to a capture by the Wayback Machine, that was still her title. But sometime between Jan. 29 and early March, that changed. Bartlett was instead then known as the chief community engagement and social impact officer. And while the society’s 2022 and 2023 annual reports each included a prominently displayed headline about Nat Geo’s “commitment to DEI,” the 2024 report, released in early June of this year, does not feature any such language.
When asked for comment on these changes, Duncan Phillips, National Geographic’s chief communications officer, provided this statement:
“The Society shifted its strategy to focus on community engagement, recognizing that many of our efforts shared a common theme of engaging with local communities in our grant funding and programmatic work. The Society’s community engagement work is embedded throughout the annual report. Our mission to use the power of science, exploration, education and storytelling to illuminate and protect the wonder of the world continues. The Society remains dedicated to fostering a community, where all—staff, Explorers, supporters and partners—are welcomed, respected and valued.”
Bartlett did not respond to multiple requests to speak to me for this story.
What might have prompted these changes—Bartlett’s title, the scrubbing of For Winter? In the absence of details from National Geographic, it’s hard not to remember that in the hours immediately following Donald Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration, he issued several executive orders related to DEI both inside and outside the federal government. One of them in particular, “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” ordered all federal agencies “to combat illegal private-sector DEI preferences, mandates, policies, programs, and activities.” We know that this has already resulted in a retreat from diversity initiatives at companies like Google, Target, Amazon, and McDonald’s, and prompted military officials to delete from their websites (and then scramble to restore) both the Army’s sexual assault guidelines and Air Force training videos featuring the Tuskegee Airmen and the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots.
National Geographic’s 2022 and 2023 annual reports shared detailed acknowledgments of the society’s donors and funders, including a page headlined “Foundations and Federal Agencies.” In the recently released 2024 report, the comparable page is simply headlined “Foundations,” although some fine print still notes the society’s “partnerships” with “federal agencies.”
When I asked whether the cancellation of For Winter, the updated language in the annual reports, or Bartlett’s title change were related to the Trump administration’s crackdown on federal funding for projects associated with DEI-related programming, National Geographic said simply, “No.”
Near the end of February, according to a source who saw the email, National Geographic Society staffers were told to not communicate with Criscitiello, and to forward any communications from her to the society’s chief legal officer, Sumeet Seam. In late April, according to another email that was shared with me, Bartlett gave her notice. Her last day was May 15.
“Before I even thought about the possibility of becoming a documentary filmmaker or a climate scientist or an environmental advocate, [the Banff tour] was just the highlight of winter,” said Sarah Koenigsberg, a filmmaker from Washington whose feature-length doc about the role of beavers in ecological restoration, The Beaver Believers, screened at the 2018 festival and was then included on the 2019 world tour. “And then my career began to take shape. The idea of even getting a film into the Banff Mountain Film Festival was like the ultimate ‘someday.’”
When your film is selected for the tour, you have the choice to sign on or not—it’s not like you’ve waived your rights by submitting to the main festival. But the only reason Koenigsberg can imagine turning down a slot is if a filmmaker was asked to make a short cut of their film for the tour, as she was, and didn’t agree that the cut-down version would work. (This was not the case with For Winter, which began screening on the tour at a slightly reduced length: 44 minutes, down from the original 54.) When I asked her if she’d ever heard of someone pulling their film out of the tour partway through, she said, “No.”
“When you get a film on tour, you get exposure, your piece gets seen, at a level that is just unprecedented. It’s global,” Koenigsberg said. “You’re just getting reach that I don’t think you can really get in many other ways. I still look back at that as a pinnacle of my career, and I cannot even imagine what it would feel like if I had a producer yank my film.”
The people who brought For Winter into existence are a mix of full-time Impact Story Lab staffers, who served mainly in various producer roles, and a larger group of contractors. (Only a handful of the crew members actually went up Mount Logan with Criscitiello, but it’s worth pointing out that those individuals risked their lives to make the film.) I attempted to reach more than a dozen of them, and some agreed to talk on the condition that they remain anonymous. National Geographic in all its iterations is an incredibly powerful institution, both a critical funding body for research or creation and a potential platform for films, photography, and other media, which makes it difficult for anyone in our corner of the industry to criticize or question it.
Of the crew members who don’t work full-time for National Geographic, more than one told me that my message, inquiring about For Winter’s disappearance, was the way they found out that the film was gone.
“The first I heard of it was from you,” said Steve Andrews, the sound recordist, nearly two months after the film was scrubbed. Andrews was one of the handful of crew who risked their safety on Logan. “Just total surprise, disappointment. It’s disappointing to see your work just disappear into the void … everyone would love to have Nat Geo on their credits.”
Seth Campbell wasn’t on the film crew, but he was a member of the expedition and featured in the film. An associate professor at the University of Maine, Campbell has known and worked with Criscitiello for more than a decade. His job was to use radar to help the team pick the likeliest drill site on Logan’s vast summit plateau—the spot where the deepest and oldest ice would be, so they could get the best climate record possible.
“Glaciers are like a stack of pancakes, and as ice flows, those layers form over time,” he explained to me over the phone while in transit from Alaska to Greenland. (The life of a glacier scientist!) “Those layers represent discrete periods of time … and so that was my role, was to try to help them pick a site for actual coring.”
Campbell missed the screening of For Winter during the tour’s stop in Bangor, Maine, on Feb. 5—and then learned soon after that the film had been pulled. He and several of his colleagues ultimately wrote a letter to the National Geographic Society, protesting the decision and stating their “considerable disappointment.”
Barring the restoration of For Winter to public view, they wrote, the society “is no longer a trusted member of the scientific community.” Their letter was sent on May 28. On June 6, they received a reply from Dr. Ian Miller, National Geographic’s chief science and innovation officer. It included the following:
“After the completion of the film, something came to light that was relevant to the film. The National Geographic Society took the appropriate steps to look into this matter responsibly. Following this review, we assessed the findings, which led to our decision to no longer air the film.”
No one I interviewed for this story said they’ve been given any explanation of what that “something” might be. On June 18, and again on July 25, National Geographic sent me an “updated” version of their one-line March statement. It contained this same language. In response to my follow-up question, the society declined to share any more details.
“I grew up reading National Geographic and looking at the pictures and thinking about the expeditions,” Campbell told me. “I guess you could call it a gold standard, but I’ve rethought that, at this point.”
He said he can’t imagine collaborating with National Geographic’s storytellers again, after this. “Right now, I’m just going to continue to be vocal, because I think it’s an inappropriate response, I think it’s an inappropriate action to remove the film. … This is where we kind of stand our ground, to be honest. We need to be doing that more. I think the science community needs to be standing up.”
Criscitiello recently came home from yet another grueling expedition, much of which I followed on Instagram. This time, she led a team to Axel Heiberg Island, in the Canadian High Arctic, where they spent more than five weeks drilling into a polar ice cap.
A few days after her return to Edmonton, in a pair of Instagram stories, Criscitiello made what I believe to be her first oblique public mention of the scrubbing of For Winter; she declined to comment for this story. In a low-key selfie video, and with audible emotion, she confessed that she had almost bailed out on the two-month expedition:
“I came very close to not going into the field at all, on a project that I’m co-lead on, and the reason is because in February, I lost the strongest and most well-aligned supporter of my work and myself that I’ve ever had in my career so far. … And I think I have been grieving since February. I can say I only went and accomplished this because of my family and my friends. And I think if anything like this has happened to you, the very best thing that we can do is keep doing our work and keep being ourselves.”
During their weeks on Axel Heiberg, Criscitiello’s team managed to set yet another record, extracting a 613-meter ice core—the deepest one ever drilled in the Americas. Sounds like the kind of feat you’d expect to hear about from National Geographic.
