Banff Mountain Movie Festival

March 22, 2007

Last night, Wendy, Ashley and I headed over to Cowell Theatre at Fort Mason to catch the 2006 Banff Mountain Movie Festival. This is a great festival, not only because it's from a ski town that I grew up learning how to ski in, but because the theme of this movie festival is a celebration of mountains.

The movies (or edited versions) that were shown last night included:

• First Ascent: Didier vs. The Cobra (The elegant, granite Cobra crack in Squamish, British Columbia is perhaps the hardest crack climb in the world and Swiss climber Didier Berthod is among the world’s best crack climbers. Far from the spotlight, Didier spends months in his epic quest to snag the first ascent). 25 minutes.

• Best of Jo (a three minute stop-action Lego film, which features a coffee-addicted guy named Jo who is eager to try all the mountain sports available to him, such as climbing, skiing, and fishing. The Best of Jo was directed and produced by 12-year-old Logan Carlstrom, the youngest filmmaker to become a finalist at the Banff Mountain Film Festival). 3 minutes.

• Ride of the Mergansers (The hooded merganser is a rare and reclusive duck found only in North America. Every spring, in the Great Lakes region, the wary hen lays and incubates her eggs in a nest high in the trees. Just 24 hours after hatching, the tiny ducklings must make the perilous leap to the ground below in order to begin life in the wild. Ride of the Mergansers brings this hidden drama to the screen). 11 minutes.

• Patagonia-A Travel To The End Of The World (Attempting the first unsupported traverse of the Southern Patagonia Icecap, Børge Ousland and Thomas Ulrich start from the small village of Tortel in August 2003. After three days of paddling into the Patagonian fjords with two kayaks each, they reach the bottom of the Jorge Montt Glacier; from here they carry their equipment up and start skiing across the ice cap. This film is most of all about the spirit of adventure. Few expeditions have had to master so many different skills to reach their goal). 40 minutes.

• Roam (Roam is a mountain-bike film that follows the travels of the world’s top riders as they explore new places to ride, and visit some of the notorious meccas of mountain biking). 18 minutes.

• Yes To The No (A look into the sport of noboarding, which is snowboarding without the use of bindings. The sport of snowboarding was essentially started by skate-boarders and surfers looking for a winter alternative to the two summer sports. Now that snowboarding has reached its peak, there is only one way to change the way snowboarding is done, and that is to take the bindings off the board and really surf the mountain). 10 minutes.

• The Thrill Seekers (One of the 12 productions from the Kendal Mountain Film Festival Extreme Film School “48-hour Film Marathon”. Two brothers try their hand at mountain biking, climbing, and another extreme sport on a camping weekend). 3 minutes.

• Mission - Epicocity (follows the EP crew as they run huge waterfalls, explore unrun rivers, and do the biggest aerial freestyle ever seen in a kayak). 15 minutes.

It was a great to see some of these films that were highly entertaining and impressive. I'd highly recommend the Banff Mountain Movie Festival to you if you ever get the chance. The actual festival is in November every year. Maybe I should check the real thing out this year...