The Banff Mountain Film Festival came to Leeds on Wednesday and Thursday last week, touring the UK for the fifth consecutive year. You might well ask what a “mountain film festival” is. The main festival itself is held in Banff which is in the Canadian Rockies, and most of the short films themselves centre around extreme sports on mountains, though there are a few exceptions. Despite this being slightly shaky ground as a basis for a film festival, it was nonetheless an extremely successful one. The setting for the extreme sports which made up most of the films lent themselves to depicting some spectacular imagery, while often foregrounding the personalities that are drawn towards the risk and challenge required by these endeavours.
The winner of the Grand Prize as well as the People’s Choice was North of the Sun (Nordfor Solar), a stunning 46 minute piece which documented two Norwegian 20 year olds attempt at living on a remote beach above the arctic circle for nine months, building themselves a hut from driftwood and spending their days surfing and cleaning up the beach. The cinematography is fantastic and captures the quiet beauty of the beach they’ve chosen to live on. The film delivers a sense of the romantic attraction to the simple isolation they choose for themselves and what they manage to achieve is impressive, both in the idyllic wooden house they build as well as the excellent film they manage to put together, using a hang glider to record aerial, panoramic shots.
The quietly impressive project of this film contrasted strongly with the style of a couple of the American produced pieces. Heaven’s Gate, for example, was extremely interesting and featured some amazing footage of wing suit pilots, but the American tendency to mythologise and engage in pseudo-philosophical self-commentary feels all the more ridiculous when placed alongside other films in which the participants and filmmakers are more thoughtful and largely let the images speak for themselves. Split of a Second, for example, was a much shorter film about wing suit flying and its subject, Espen Fadnes, reflected on the desire to do it without resorting to clichés about how it beats the drudgery of working in an office. It was a concise but extremely engaging film, which avoided the kind of philosophising that made pieces like Heaven’s Gate and the short climbing piece 35 sometimes seem like an advert for a bank or insurance company, in their constant reflections on what life is about. Another of the longer films which really stood out was High Tension, which hinged upon an outbreak of violence between the Swiss alpinist Ueli Steck and Sherpas working on Everest. It was an inciteful portrait of Steck, as well as an interesting contemplation on the state of the global, commercial industry surrounding Everest and how this relates to the local Sherpa population.
Overall, the programming of the festival was a well-balanced mix of levity and more serious pieces, with a strong component of impressive cinematography and engaging characters, making it extremely accessible to someone, like myself, not belonging to the communities these films come from.
Jake Hulyer