The Banff Mountain Film Fest is an outdoor film fest held every year in Banff (no doy) where 60 films are screened from a submission pool of about 370. They range in topic from an elderly woman bookkeeper living in Kathmandu, chronicling all climbers of Mount Everest, to a band of young mountain bikers road tripping in New Zealand, running on beer and firecrackers and joy riding on top of rented motorhomes.
This is my third time to the BMFF tour, they don’t screen all 60 films for our evening, instead they choose nine or ten of the best. The event features free Kicking Horse coffee beans with your admission and prizes of climbing gym passes. The dress code is smart wool and the amount of smart wool in this theatre represents an entire year of New Zealand’s GDP.
As it’s my third festival, I’ve recognized the film curators’ recipe for success, each of the following is the subject of a film:
- A dog
- An active elderly person
- Two inept, self-deprecating goofs (usually from a Commonwealth country) who somehow bumble their way through an amazing adventure
- A gutsy woman
- A person with a disability
It’s an unassuming list, so why do I always end up hate-watching half of the films they screen?
I guess it’s because I have a hard time reconciling my love for the activities shown in the films with the a-holes that produce and star in them. Unfortunately, these egomaniacal, out of touch, storytelling illiterati are the ones portraying what the culture of these sports looks like, and too often it looks bad.
The BMFF never fails to have a movie or two narrated with that self important false profundity that is the disease of my native B.C. You know the ones, they say stuff like, “Everything has spirit, and to be present in that environment, to understand the risks, it’s so surreal.”
What are you trying to say here? You like doing stuff? - Ok.
I’m prone to wonder why these characters succeed in this world; my best theory is this: A lot of these people are doing scary stuff, and there’s a real sense of accomplishment in doing flips off cliffs, but these people aren’t surrounded by much of an old guard. They don’t have coaches telling them to keep their attitudes in check, they don’t have teammates (not in any real sense) to tell them they’re being ridiculous. As solo athletes they’re wrapped in self propelled delusions of grandeur and surrounded by enablers.
But there’s a happier side of this festival that makes it worthwhile. I love the movies starring the inept dorks stumbling along on their incredible adventure. The stars of these movies talk in genuinely about how they love adventure and thought they might give this particularly big adventure a try. They don’t belabour the risks and the hardship, they approach it as a labour of love that they’re lucky to be able to do, they’re like good parents with a new baby.
The BMFF also usually shows a film displaying top talent in a given sport - kayaking or rock climbing or mountain biking - without all the unnecessary spiritual discourse. These are the producers applying the failsafe concept of Show Don’t Tell.
Finally, there’s the way they make these films. Technology is moving thrillingly fast in terms of how we’re able to capture these sports on camera. Less than two years ago my classmate showed me a a video of someone testing a go pro strapped to a remote control helicopter; 21 months later it’s hard to imagine a world where this wasn’t an option. I was equally amazed by the way they brought old photos to life for a history of rock climbing film called Valley Uprising. The Ken Burns effect (pioneered by Canadians on the NFB) in which cameras pan across photos to give them motion and bring them to life, has been improved and rejigged so much that the original trick is hard to recognize through this remix. They now use effects to make the black and white photos 3D, so that instead of gazing across them, we can now walk through them. Top that off with bits of illustration to evoke the arm motions like drinking or flipping burgers and these 70 year old photographs are pulsing with energy.
The teeter-totter of loving and hating the films at the BMFF forces me to ask Why do I (dis)like this? If I watched the movies on their own, I could simply say, “that was great” or, “that sucked,” and never consider why. Watching the good paired with the bad forces makes me think, “why is this ski film great, and this one horrible? Why is this Gore Tex guy relatable and this one repugnant?” The range of emotion the films provoke in me have unintentionally made the BMFF the greatest drama film(s) I’ve ever seen. I’ll keep going.