Transported by the Banff Mountain Film Festival

Ed is certainly the most outdoorsy person I know in New York, but we do have some friends who enjoy hiking and the odd skiing/snowboarding trip. It must have been from one of them that I first heard about the Banff Mountain Film Festival. I don't remember much of what was said, or by whom, but I remember being intrigued by the sound of it: a collection of films all about outdoor adventures in New York? Be still my heart. This year, Ed and I managed to get our act together and went to one of the showings last night.  In the future, as long as I'm in or near a city that hosts the film series I hope to make it an annual tradition.

The full-scale festival takes place in late October/early November in (of course) Banff, Canada. After the films are vetted by judges and audiences, the best of the lot go on the road. In New York there were two series of films being shown on alternate nights. We missed the Sunday series but caught the second half on Monday night.

Ed and I go to Symphony Space for lots of literary events where we are generally the youngest people in the room. Cerebral humor and polite conversation dominate. The atmosphere couldn't have been more different last night; the place was crawling with fleece, beards, sport packs, reusable water bottles, and natural hair color. New York City is hardly a haven for outdoor enthusiasts, but they sure come out of the woodwork for this event. I imagine climbing gyms and REIs across the city are deserted during the few days that the Banff films run each year. As we waited for the show to start, we were entertained by the musical stylings of a woman onstage with an Alphorn. Our friend Dan says she's a fixture who's been playing at the festival for as long as he can remember. I wondered how she took her instrument on the subway. The event was emceed by a cheerful young Canadian who interspersed his film introductions with charming, squeaky-clean jokes.

Most of the films we saw were short, between six and twelve minutes. There was no program, so I'm relying on my memory here, but I think we saw somewhere in the neighborhood of eight films over about three hours. The topics were things like white water kayaking, mountain biking in the Swiss Alps, mountaineering press coverage in Nepal, deep powder back-country skiing, a biologist's search for rare frog in the wilds of Guyana, and trail running in Nambia. Here's a clip of one of the films I was able to find. If, like me, you don't know much about mountain biking, you should definitely watch it. You'll be astounded.

The longest film, at 48 minutes, was called Heaven's Gate. It was about a group of free jumpers who don squirrel suits and jump off of high things trying to stage a stunt in China. If you don't have a heart condition, look for videos of these jumpers on YouTube - it's wild. There was also a long-ish film of almost half an hour called Spice Girl about the best female climber in the world.

The line-up was punctuated by an intermission of fifteen minutes, and after the intermission, there were several raffles. Audience members who were not me won ski bags, shoes and boots, hats, coffee, Clif bars, lift tickets, and Alpine Club memberships.

Just about all of the films were either documentaries, or a series of impressive shots of people doing impressive things in beautiful places. Only one had a sort of fictional "plot" to it. That seems to be the nature of outdoor films, though. The stunts are crazy enough, and the characters are eccentric enough that no script is needed. You really can't make this stuff up. There was only one film I didn't care for - I found myself quite captivated by every one of the others. The cinematography was beautiful, and even the soundtracks were well-chosen. (This latter point is important when there's very little dialogue and you spend most of the film just admiring people being athletic against stunning backdrops.) And it was wonderful to be transported out of the city to some of the most pristine places on Earth for an evening.

If this kind of thing interests you and you live in a large-ish city, I highly recommend you visit this page to find out if there's a screening coming up near you. Even if you don't live in a large-ish city, go there anyway to watch the introductory video; it will be seven-and-a-half minutes well spent.