Movie ‘The Highest Road’ tracks 2 cyclists with FA on Himalayan journey
Documentary paralleling life with rare disease to premiere at US film festival
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A new documentary chronicling the story of two men with Friedreich’s ataxia (FA) as they undertake a seemingly impossible athletic endeavor — cycling across mountains, with a rare muscle disease — will premiere at a film festival in California later this month.
The movie, “The Highest Road,” is directed by Allan Thompson, a journalist making his feature documentary debut. It focuses on Kyle Bryant and Sean Baumstark, who both live with FA, as they join a team of cyclists to ride 200 miles along the Umling La Road in the Indian Himalayas — the highest paved road in the world, at elevations up to 19,000 feet.
“The mountain is a physical representation of what the rare disease community has been climbing for decades,” Bryant, who is an executive producer of the film as well as its subject, said in a press release announcing the movie’s “world premiere” on Oct. 17 as part of the 2026 Newport Beach Film Festival. Tickets to the showing, at the Lido Theater in Newport Beach, are available online.
“We wanted audiences to feel the enormity of that challenge, but also to see what can happen when patients refuse to accept that the impossible is impossible,” Bryant said.
The film draws parallels between the physical enormity of this undertaking and the decades of advocacy and research done by people with FA and other rare diseases. These years of work led to the approval of Skyclarys (omaveloxolone) in 2023 as the first treatment for FA in the U.S.
The movie intertwines Bryant and Baumstark’s journey along the Umling La with interviews from people across the rare disease community, including Janet Woodcock, MD, former acting commissioner of the U.S Food and Drug Administration, and Jen Farmer, CEO of Friedreich’s Ataxia Research Alliance (FARA). The film also has thoughts from Colin Meyer, MD, the former chief medical officer at Reata Pharmaceuticals, the company that developed Skyclarys (now sold by Biogen).
Together, these voices aim to paint a picture of how the rare disease community’s tenacity and resilience continue to make the seemingly impossible into a reality.
Advocate Kyle Bryant starred in 2015 documentary ‘The Ataxian’
Among the attendees at the premiere will be Friedreich’s Ataxia News‘ own Matt Lafleur, who writes the column Little Victories and serves as the senior director of patient affairs for Bionews, the site’s parent company.
“I was lucky enough to be invited to the world premiere of this movie, and I really look forward to it,” Lafleur said, adding that the journey along the world’s highest road “is a great analogy for the first treatment of FA, which came out a few years ago.”
Lafleur is a longtime admirer of Bryant — who previously was featured in the 2015 movie “The Ataxian,” free to watch on YouTube — and said the cyclist’s advocacy has impacted his own life with FA.
“People like me loved the first documentary on FA starring Kyle Bryant,” Lafleur said. “Kyle’s first documentary inspired me to buy a trike, which is something I never would’ve done. I can’t wait to see what this movie inspires me to do!”
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