Go Film It on the Mountain

By Kurt Repanshek

At today’s mountain film festivals, you can find movies that are stretching and redefining the entire genre.

Nesting mergansers starring at a mountain film festival? Next thing you know they’ll have a film about coffee-addled Lego skiers and snowboarders. What? They’ve done that, too? Yes, the genre best known for showing the latest assaults on the world’s most dangerous peaks, or perhaps a kayak descent through Tibet’s frothing Tsango Gorge, is more unpredictable than ever. And more popular than ever, too. Where else can you get your vicarious jollies by watching the world’s best athletes on screen doing what you wish you could be doing, only to find them sitting next to you when the lights go on?

 

Though not exactly a new genre—the International Film Festival of Mountains, Exploration and Adventure notched its 55th edition in Trento, Italy, in May— “mountain films” are increasingly popular, thanks no doubt to the growth of outdoor adventure TV channels that leave no rock unclimbed nor river unpaddled.

 

Google “mountain film festivals,” and in barely a third of a second you’ll get more than 12,100 hits. One of those is for the International Alliance for Mountain Film, which at last Google listed 17 major festivals. They range from the renowned Banff Mountain Film Festival (held in early November) and the International Mountaineering Film Festival staged in the Czech Republic at Teplice nad Metuji during the last weekend in August to the Taos Mountain Film Festival every October.

 

The variety of films at one of these festivals is also impressive. For instance, this May the Telluride Mountain Film Festival opened its 29th edition, one whose movie showings ranged from ski films (Nine Winters Old Warming) to environmental awareness documentaries (The Grizzly Bear in a Time of Global Warming) to traditional climbing flicks (First Ascent) to political overviews (Siachen: A War for Ice).

 

And let’s not neglect the growing list of cities around the world that either host their own, original festival or screen the best of the best from others. Indeed, festival locations are almost as exotic as the camera locations: Maui, Katmandu, even Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia’s capital.“There seems to be one more every week,” says Shannon O’Donoghue, acting director of the Banff Mountain Film Festival. “I’ve been here since 1998, and the number of mountain film festivals popping up is pretty phenomenal.”

 

What’s the mojo behind these festivals? If you’ve ever stared up at a mountain, you know exactly what it is.

 

“Mountains are pretty powerful places,” O’Donoghue says. “The wilderness can be a pretty powerful place. I think it’s (the attraction) about harnessing that power and inspiration.”

Perhaps because of that wave of popularity the folks at Banff stretch the limits, evidenced in 2006 by their decision to show Ride of the Mergansers, an 11-minute documentary literally focused on nesting Hooded Mergansers in a northern Minnesota lake. And then there was Best of Jo, a 12-year-old’s 3-minute stop-action ski and snowboarding flick starring a Lego character buzzed on caffeine.

 

“If you sent me a description of it (Ride of the Mergansers) I might say this might not fit in,” says O’Donoghue. “(But) you get this up on the screen and it’s just an obvious fit for the festival. People clap as they see these little ducklings climb up out of the nest to drop into the water to begin the next part of their life.”

 

When the lights come up, you just might find yourself applauding along with one or two of the stars in one of the documentaries you just saw. “On any Friday night, you could have people who have summited 8,000-meter peaks sitting next to somebody whose adventure is walking off-pavement for a few hours,” O’Donoghue says.

 

One of those might be Michael Brown, a filmmaker who has scaled Mount Everest more than once to capture climbers at work and who follows the festival circuit to generate both buzz and business.

 

“Film festivals matter hugely to us. We submit to several and hope to get into a few,” Brown e-mailed me from Everest, where he is co-director (along with Greg MacGillivray) and director of mountain photography for the film Return to Everest IMAX in 3D. “I know that some are in summer, but only a very few. More are in spring and fall, even winter. Mountain-oriented people don’t like to be inside watching films in summer.”

 

Unless, of course, they happen to be in the Southern Hemisphere where the seasons are reversed. If you find yourself in New Zealand during July 5–8, consider taking in the Wanaka Mountain Film Festival. One film you will not want to miss there is Amazon Vertical, which follows an international team of climbers as they attempt to scale the wall of Salto Angel, the highest waterfall on earth. After a long canoe trip through the Amazon jungle, they live on the wall for 15 days in extremely difficult conditions that push them to their limits.

 

While ski and snowboarding films are popular, they haven’t spawned as many festivals. Instead, many of these films wind up in the “action sports” category of mountain film festivals.

 

 

 

Still, there are at least two noteworthy ski/snowboarder film fests noteworthy. The VAST Awards competition held each February in Munich, Germany, doles out a total purse of $50,000 that lures films tracking the best skiers and snowboarders the international community can toss out. Awards go not only to the best films, but also to the Best Rookie Skier and Best Skier Performance.

 

Closer to home and, shall we say, a wee bit more grass-roots and edgy, the Cold Smoke Awards roll out every April in Bozeman, Montana, to honor, Academy Award style, films with the Best Jib & Best Chunder, Best Pow & Huck, and Best Line, among other fall-line nuances.

 

 

Writer Kurt Repanshek lives in Park City, Utah.

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