Venture Out: Documentary Review
By Meera Shroff, Bethesda Green Environmental Leader
While the light streams through their window in Venice, Florida, Tyler Lerch, a young nonbinary person, packs their bags with optimism for their first adult hiking trip. “Whenever I’m in nature, I just feel all the pressure fall away,” Lerch said in the documentary. “I don’t have to be someone specific or be anything. I can just exist and not have to think about it. And for me, that’s such a relief.” Lerch reconnected with nature through The Venture Out Project, a nonprofit organization that leads outdoor adventure trips specifically for LGBTQ people. The organization was the subject of a documentary, Venture Out, which was featured in the 2020 Environmental Film Festival in the Nation’s Capital. By showcasing environmentally themed films like Venture Out, the Environmental Film Festival works to advance people’s understanding of and care for the environment.
The documentary starts with the story of Perry Cohen, a queer transgender person, who created The Venture Out Project. Cohen began the organization after coming out at 38 years old as transgender and eventually transitioning. “[Transitioning] was incredibly freeing for me, and that was the beginning of the Venture Out Project,” Cohen said in the documentary. After the organization started, Cohen was surprised that people kept coming back for more trips, even though they were taught skills that made them capable of going on trips on their own. Cohen realized that the sense of community the Venture Out Project’s trips created was essential.
Image Source: Condé Nast Traveler. Photo taken by Palmer Morese.
The documentary skillfully conveys the importance of the Venture Out Project community’s warmth and sense of freedom. It reels the viewer into the scenes, making them feel close and personal with the people they watch and the park’s landscape, even though the whole documentary only lasts 15 minutes. The camera follows Lerch as they embark on their trip for transgender and nonbinary people in Rocky Mountain National Park, and the trip feels like a snippet out of time: an escape for LGBTQ+ people to truly be themselves, with a community who recognizes their challenges and successes.
The transgender and nonbinary hikers’ struggles are not hidden or minimized, but they act just like anyone else: they talk, they draw, they climb and laugh together. It emphasizes a key idea that I wish everyone understood, LGBTQ people are human. Jamie DiNicola, a transgender queer person, was the Executive Producer of Venture Out and co-directed with Matt Mikkelson and Palmer Morse, who co-founded Spruce Tone Films. DiNicola mentioned in an interview that he purposely collaborated with Mikkelson and Morse when he realized they intended to humanize, rather than fetishize or ridicule, LGBTQ people. “I hope that what comes through in this film and my filmmaking in general is that trans[gender] experiences are as varied as anyone else’s experiences,” he said.
The documentary also makes the viewer care about the national park they travel in. As the group hikes, the documentary intersperses scenes of the park’s natural beauty with their stories: the sun shines through a canopy of trees, a majestic deer turns its antlers in the early morning, and snow-capped mountains stand out against the sky. These images remind the viewer of the park’s beauty that they must protect, even if they can only see it through a screen. The Venture Out Project serves as an opportunity for LGBTQ+ people to reconnect with nature, and Venture Out provides a limited version of that by having the viewer live through the hikers’ experiences.
Image Source: REI
It was beautiful to see how the LGBTQ+ participants felt so liberated and at home on their hike. I am cisgender, which means that the gender I was assigned at birth matches my gender. This means that I will never experience or understand the struggles that those featured in the documentary face, but I am truly grateful that organizations like this exist and that communities like this exist. Venture Out helped me learn more about the experiences of the LGBTQ+ community and I would highly recommend it, especially for people looking for a break from loud, depressing, fast-paced media.
Venture Out is available on Youtube and through their page on the Environmental Film Festival’s website. To support The Venture Out Project, the organization accepts donations, which helps them keep costs low for LGBTQ people who otherwise couldn’t afford to attend. Other LGBTQ environmental groups to support include Out for Sustainability, Out There Adventures and Queer Nature.
About the author:
Meera Shroff, Bethesda Green Environmental Leader
Meera is a Walt Whitman High School Senior. She is committed to combating the broad, daunting issue of climate change and its environmental repercussions. She believes working locally is essential to protecting the earth and build a better future.
