A short film festival sounds overly arty, perhaps even crossing the line into the massively pretentious. Something you as an active, outdoorsy person wouldn’t really be interested in. Well, in an adrenalin-boosted reversal, Cape Union Mart brings you the Banff Mountain Film Festival; aimed at people more likely to be found in the wild settings seen in the films rather than cloistered in cinemas on a regular basis. However, it doesn’t matter how you classify yourself; you should still go and watch this short film series. Each will inspire you to want to do something more – maybe run outside and climb Table Mountain – and then make you feel horribly inadequate for not actually doing so.
The films cover a broad range of adventurous activities, none of them taking themselves too seriously although some may be a tad self-congratulatory – just ensuring that you know how much they love what they are doing and how lucky they are doing it. All the shorts are slickly edited, which sometimes glosses over the actual content until you really look at what is going on and how utterly insane some of these people are. The opening film The Longest Way is difficult to follow with blink-quick edits, so just sit back and absorb as much as you can. Then think what it means that someone spent an entire year walking from Beijing to Urumqi (basically across the whole of China from east to west) in a year – and then conveying that in a five-minute film chronicling the growth of his beard.
The overriding theme is obvious – get out there and explore, but more subtly it encourages you to look at the world around you and find the adventure no matter where you are. It doesn’t always take a long arduous journey to Argentina (Tuzgle) or Kamchatka in Russia (Eastern Rises). In Life Cycles, wild nature is explored through footage of mountain bikers doing aerial acrobatics through their local environment that includes scenic forests as well as farmland; showing you that it’s up to you to make the most of where you are. Similarly, in that it exposes what you can find if you just look hard enough, Into Darkness explores hidden underground cave systems that are probably less well explored than our moon’s surface. Be warned it can be uncomfortable to watch and if you are faintly claustrophobic in any way you may have a panic attack watching the tiny crevasses these people squeeze their bodies through.
All the films show rather exceptional people who have obviously spent a large part of their lives dedicated to the sports they love. In Dream Result, paddlers throw themselves off waterfalls the size of ten story buildings and shaking off broken bones in their excitement to get back in the water. In The Swiss Machine, true dedication is described by footage of Ueli Steck racing up vertical cliff-faces thousands of metres high faster than you could probably walk the same distance, but it is never portrayed as easy. His training regime to shorten his time by just a little bit takes a year, that it shaves over an hour off his ascent up the Eiger in Switzerland is as shocking to him as it is to everyone else. But that is what happens when you really commit yourself to something fully.
The Banff Mountain Film Festival premieres on 28 October and runs till 3 November.
The films will be screened once daily at 20h00 at the following cinemas (running time is approx. two hours):
Cavendish Square, Cape Town
Tygervalley Centre, Cape Town
Sandton City, Johannesburg
Brooklyn Mall, Pretoria
To book for Banff Mountain Film Festival:
Tel: 082-16789 or go to www.sterkinekor.co.za.
To win a double ticket to the fan preview of the Banff Mountain Film Festival taking place in Cape Town only visit Getaway Competitions and answer the easy question.
