Outdoor adventure alive on the big screen
Quality continues to soar, climb, pedal and paddle in the cream of the crop of outdoor adventure films coming for the annual screening in Spokane next weekend.
The films are hot from the competition that concluded last week at the 20th annual Banff Mountain Film Festival, the largest and one of the most prestigious mountain festivals in the world. Of 319 films from 39 countries entered in the 2005 competition, 56 were publicly screened in Banff.
About 15 of them will be shown in Spokane over the course of three days on the Banff festival’s World Tour, which features a mix of the top festival films.
The festival has become famous for fostering films chronicling the passions and obsessions – tragedies as well as victories – of mountaineers, endurance and extreme athletes, and environmental and cultural efforts around the world.
Spokane is one the tour’s first stops before it continues to more than 250 communities and 25 countries around the globe.
“The caliber of the films gets better every year, and this is no exception,” said Paul Fish of Mountain Gear, which is sponsoring the tour next Friday, Saturday and Sunday at The Met.
The World Tour is a mix of all festival genres, from shorts to feature-length films, humor to drama, death-defying fast action to contemplative documentaries.
Local sponsors can select from a couple dozen films on the World Tour, but Banff festival officials said they wouldn’t know which films they’d be releasing until later this week.
“We’re still waiting to get permission contracts faxed back to us from places like Poland,” tour coordinator Jim Baker said Monday.
“What struck me this year,” Fish said, “is that there were excellent films in every category as well as in every length. The last two years we’ve had a little trouble picking which films to show. This year we’re having trouble picking which films we won’t show.”
A variety of four to seven different films will be shown each day in Spokane. For instance, films with a high probability of showing include:
Friday — “Charles, Edouard: Time Stands Still,” filmed in a French alpine village that’s been deserted by everyone but two elderly brothers who continue living in a routine of caring for their animals and watching the slow cycle of the natural world. The French production was voted the 2005 Best Film on Mountain Culture.
Saturday — “Magic Mountain,” the 2005 People’s Choice Award winner, recounts the offbeat story of a Canadian educator’s efforts, hiking over 9,000-foot passes and through a frozen river gorge, to help educate and empower illiterate women in the remote mountains of northwest India.
Sunday — “Bouldering in the Ozarks,” what Fish describes as “the best bouldering film I’ve ever seen,” features 24-year-old rock jock Chris Sharma tackling his hardest climbing problem. “Just as good,” Fish said, “is a 10-year-old girl climbing (a route rated at) V-10, which means really hard. I think she’s the only female who’s bouldered her age.”
Mountain bikers, skiers, kayakers and other extreme-sports lovers will get their fix during the World Tour showings, Fish said. “And there’s some funny stuff, too.”
Fish said he was hoping to be able to show some of his personal favorites from the Banff festival, including a ski film that intertwines skiers and BASE jumpers carving turns on Mount Blanc, and “The Retrospective Red Bull Rampage,” with its footage of outrageous stunts from a legendary 2001 mountain biking event.
“We honestly won’t know exactly which films we’ll be able to show until Friday,” Fish said.
The festival’s World Tour also is scheduled to visit Inland Northwest locations at Coeur d’Alene, Sandpoint and Pullman this winter. With different films featured each day, the three-day run in Spokane offers the best chance to see widest selection of films outside of going to the festival in Banff.
However, the World Tour’s January stop in Sandpoint has been expanded to three nights.
If you want nothing but non-stop high-adrenaline action, save your dough to buy earplugs for the Radical Reels World Tour, which is scheduled to be shown in this area at the Panida Theater in Sandpoint on Feb. 20 and probably in Spokane on a yet-to-be determined date in March or April, Baker said.