She inherited his drive. She also inherited his demons.

POLE POLE follows Shelby Cude, a high-achieving multi-camera director for major touring artists, as she escapes her burnout by documenting a friend's charity climb of Mount Kilimanjaro. What begins as a favor—film the climb, help promote a non-profit, maybe spread some of her father's ashes at the summit—becomes an intimate reckoning with the grief and guilt she's carried since her father Donnie's suicide.

Shelby climbs alongside four strangers and is supported by twenty-eight Tanzanian porters and guides who enforce the mountain's only rule: pole pole—slowly, slowly. It's the key to acclimatization, to survival. But for a woman who's spent her life moving fast, working harder, believing she could control outcomes through sheer force of will, this forced slowness becomes both torture and revelation.

When their lead guide falls dangerously ill with altitude sickness and refuses help mirroring her father's final years of rejecting support, Shelby faces a devastating truth: you cannot save someone who will not grab the rope. Carrying her camera and her father's ashes, she learns that some summits can't be reached alone, some weights require thirty-two people to carry, and some journeys can only be made pole pole—slowly, slowly.