Warren Miller films have soundtracked the start of ski season for decades, and this winter they come with a first: a woman hosting and narrating the franchise. Comedian and longtime skier Katie Burrell takes the reins for "Days Off," the 77th Warren Miller feature, which heads out on its North American theatre tour later this month.
If the name rings a bell, it's probably from "Dream Job" or her feature film "Weak Layers" — both of which put women front and centre while gently skewering skiing's earnest, hardcore culture. Outside Magazine has called her the "queen of slopeside fun," and she describes herself as a "professional leisure athlete": a genuinely seasoned skier who'd rather sleep in and cruise groomers than chase an alpine start. That everywoman streak is exactly what she brings to a role previously held by Jonny Moseley for nearly two decades, and before him, by Warren Miller himself.
Burrell says the hardest part was mental, not technical. Comparing herself to her famous predecessors kept paralysing her, so she stopped trying to imitate them. Where Warren built a personal storytelling style laced with humour and Moseley connected stories through his narration, Burrell's approach is to hand the microphone to the athletes: your story is the best story you can tell, and hers gets told alongside it.
The film skips the traditional segment format in favour of chapters, and the one that clearly hit hardest follows big-mountain skier Christina Lustenberger and her partner Guillaume "Gee" Pierrel in Chamonix. Burrell spent several days with the couple — hearing the tale of their first date, watching their meticulously planned mission unravel, meeting their friends — footage that now carries extra weight after Pierrel was killed in an avalanche in June. She calls those days in Cham an insane gift she'll cherish for life.
On being the first woman in the role, Burrell is both sincere and cheeky. She sees it as part of a broader shift where women have more agency over spaces and stories that weren't built for them. But her sassier take: why wouldn't it be a woman, and why wouldn't it be her? Her stated goal for the film is inclusivity — making skiing feel less alienating across gender, experience level and status, and welcoming more people into the sport rather than filtering them out.
For travellers, this matters beyond the cinema. The Warren Miller tour is an annual ritual that kicks off winter trip planning, and "Days Off" is a good prompt to think about a ski season that includes more than just hunting pow stashes: long lunches, groomer laps, and trips with people of mixed abilities all get their due here. Tickets for the North American tour are on sale now through the Warren Miller website. If you've ever felt the sport wasn't quite built for you, this year's film makes a decent argument that it is.
