“You’re so amazing!”
“No. I’m an average person with a lot of problems.”
The exploration of this sentiment is too often stifled in the pursuit — and documentation — of outdoorsy adventure and achievement. Since 2015, however, the No Man’s Land Film Festival, has sought to fix that.
The festival visits Volcanic Theatre Pub on May 29.
In a long-running partnership with BendFilm, this collection of nine independent adventure shorts packs plenty of action. But instead of offering pure “pow porn,” as No Man’s Land Executive Director Kathy Karlo puts it — the films detail the myriad challenges experienced by female and female-identifying endurance and outdoor athletes. Or, better said by the festival organizers, “to un-define feminine in adventure and sport through film.”
This year’s short films showcase a mother’s experience balancing childbirth and parenting with the fulfillment of competitive gravel cycling; a Japanese American skier details the racial alienation she experiences, regardless of which side of the Pacific she finds herself; and a devoted runner comes to terms with a mid-life autism diagnosis. Six more distinct and powerful short films round out the two-hour screening.
The self-identifying “average” person mentioned above is Marisa Pasnick, a leading Pacific Northwest ultrarunner who, in the film “Beyond the Finish Line,” shares her experience tackling the 2023 Big Foot 200, the aptly named 200-mile ultra marathon through Washington’s Northern Cascade Range. Not only is the race twice as long as any race Pasnick has finished, the Washington native speaks openly in the film about the persistent challenge of living, let alone ultra-running, while in recovery from a disordered eating diagnosis that began in childhood.
“You shouldn’t eat that. You’re more attractive when you’re thin. You’re not good enough. You need to eat more if you want to run.”
That’s the destructive inner voice that haunts Pasnick, which she and Director of Photography Matthew Williams, who owns Black Rabbit Collective, recreate in the haunting voiceover that opens the film. The camera’s gaze pursues Pasnick through the lush trails near her childhood home on Cypress Island — negative self-talk she can’t escape.
“The voiceover felt like one of the most vulnerable moments of everything I talked about in the film,” Pasnick said. “It’s my inner dialogue and everyone’s gonna hear exactly what goes on in my head.”
Pasnick met Williams through Evergreen Trail Runs, a Washington trail running collective. She’s spoken openly about her recovery from disordered eating since her mid-20s, she says, when she began her second stay at a treatment center.
“Eating disorders are so all-consuming,” Pasnick said. “A lot of people have them and it’s hard to talk about because everybody has a different experience. For me it’s like two voices in my head: the eating disorder voice and my voice. Sometimes the eating disorder voice is screaming and I can’t hear anything else.”
In the film, we meet Pasnick’s support team, which includes her husband and pacing partner. Pasnick meal preps, trains and toes the start line of the behemoth foot race that will gain 45,000 feet in 200 miles.
“I have butterflies like before a first date,” Pasnick tells the camera, shaking out her legs at the start line. “But like, butterflies before a bad first date.”
Through coordinated checkpoints and a small team of GoPro operators running behind Pasnick, Williams captures Pasnick’s tenacity amid the towering, mist-ringed Cascades.
Yet the film’s hairiest moment visits Pasnick two months after she sets off on the Big Foot 200. Her daily caloric intake, which she ramped up while training and during the race itself, was difficult to re-calibrate during her recovery period. She experienced a low in her relationship with food she hadn’t experienced in years.
“It’s just reconnecting with those hunger and fullness cues in a different way,” Pasnick said. “Intuitive eating is just so hard and it’s a different process when you’re training versus when you’re not. It’s all about that mental shift and how you approach it.”
The short film, “Full Spectrum,” centers on Caroline Whatley, a runner based in Asheville, North Carolina. Running has long given Whatley a sense of peace and control that social situations and changing environments strip away. In her mid-40s, Whatley explains via narration that she took an autism spectrum evaluation in early 2024. In the weeks between the test and the diagnosis, Whatley found herself hoping for the answers that a positive diagnosis might bring.
“For the first time in my life, things were making sense in a way I never knew they could,” she says in the film. “And yet, identifying as autistic is a very new way to understand myself. It’s different than the realization I had when I was 19 that I was queer, which wasn’t hard for me at all.”
Filmmaker Erin McGrady, who co-owns Authentically Asheville, an LGBTQ-centered online travel guide, with Whatley, is also her wife. McGrady said making “Full Spectrum,” which was made possible through the festival’s grant program, was the creative byproduct of the frustration they felt researching late-diagnosis autism.
“There’s just not a whole lot that’s been written or said or researched about late diagnosis as an adult,” McGrady said. “We wanted to put something out there that other people could relate to. We’re just really passionate about trying to normalize autism; it’s not something to be ashamed of.”
Sharing the couple’s journey illustrated for McGrady how autism is distinct for each person. In the film, Whatley speaks about the exhaustion she feels from “masking,” a term that refers to the exhausting effort of trying to pass in a neurotypical world.
“Hopefully, people become more understanding and that masking becomes less frequent,” Whatley says.
This article appears in Source Weekly May 22, 2025.
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