The Olympic sport of curling involves two teams of players carefully sliding large stones down an icy lane while “sweepers” use brooms to polish the rocks’ gradual paths toward a target.
There will be no curling shown at the Banff Mountain Film Festival.
Any activity—Olympic or otherwise—that graces the screen at this sports and culture movie fest will have to clock in pretty high on the adrenaline meter. Now in its 34th year, the touring festival will hit 285 cities and towns worldwide. In Santa Cruz, Banff will feature 12 films shown over two nights at the Rio Theatre.
After Kranked—Revolve opens the show Friday night with 11 minutes of mountain bike acrobatics, Japanese director Masaki Sekiguchi presents his three-minute film Deep/Shinsetsu like snowfall itself: pure, clean and wordless. With no voiceovers, sound effects or interviews, only a somber acoustic ballad playing softly in the background, skiers take on a wraithlike quality as they plunge through a seemingly endless ocean of deep, soft white.
Next, it’s a childhood adventure worth bragging about in Finding Farley. Filmmakers Karsten Heuer and Leanne Allison chart a course across the Great White North using locales that Canadian author Farley Mowat brought to life in famous nature tales like Never Cry Wolf. With their 2-year-old son Zev and spunky dog Willow, the family sets out on a quest to meet Mowat himself in Nova Scotia. The travelogue captures the beauty and scope of Canada as well as the personal drama that accompanies a nomadic household.
The quirky MedeoZ brings back the high-octane action. In this film, a photographer tries to take a single photo of six different mountain sports: skiing, snowboarding, mountaineering, paragliding, speed riding and BASE-jumping. Pulling off the feat won’t be easy, however, and director/protagonist Guillaume Broust has to marshal not only timing but egos as the six extreme disciplines come together behind one lens.
The cultural side of the festival flexes its muscles in the next film as director Will Parrinello presents Mustang—Journey of Transformation. The movie is set in the kingdom of Mustang, a 780-square-mile hunk of Himalayan pastureland located in northern Nepal. A secret kingdom that has long shunned Westerners, it fosters what many consider a “pure” form of Tibetan culture. Now, under steadily rising poverty, the ornate 15th century monasteries for which the kingdom is known are crumbling from neglect. Parrinello travels to the isolated land and documents the struggle to save the architectural and spiritual heritage with awe-inspiring shots of grand vistas and intimate moments, including an extended interview with the Dalai Lama.
Closing Friday night, First Ascent: Alone on the Wall tells the story of a young, possibly psychotic, man named Alex Honnold. Honnold lives in a van. Traveling from rock climb to rock climb, the fearless 24-year-old sacrifices home cooking and hygiene for his stony relationship with sheer mountain walls. His holy grail: to climb Yosemite National Park’s legendary face, Half Dome, with no ropes and nothing to save him should he lose his grip. Honnold says he climbs his best without ropes. He’ll have to—one slip and all that will be left of our hero is a smudge at the bottom of the mountain and a scary story climbers tell their children.
On Saturday, Revolution One introduces viewers to the exciting world of off-road unicycling, then ramps up the drama as four friends survive rock falls, freezing limbs and each other during 20 days on a rock wall in Azazel. The film documents the quartet as they attempt to chart a new route up the Trango Pulpit Tower, a nearly 20,000-foot cliff in Pakistan that holds mythic status among the locals.
The action jumps continents next, to the Americans for Take A Seat and back across the Atlantic when Rush Sturges’ Africa Revolutions Tour shows what kind of trouble a group of kayakers can get into in Uganda and Madagascar. In many cases the crew of river rats represents the first lunatics to ride the crocodile- and wasp- infested rivers in kayaks. The white-knuckle action is undercut by group companion Rita Riewerts and the Sun Catchers Project, which gives simple, solar powered ovens to rural villagers to use for cooking and sanitizing water.
Santa Cruz native Chris Sharma got his start climbing the plywood wall at Pacific Edge Climbing Gym on Bronson Street. These days he’s on to bigger and badder walls, but none perhaps is more taxing than California’s Mt. Clark and its 500-foot overhanging monster, dubbed “unclimbable” by everyone who has tired to scale it. In First Ascent: Impossible Climb, Sharma is out to prove the title inaccurate and spends days in the desert in “monastic devotion” as he battles the stone until only one remains.
Finally, ending this year’s Banff offerings on a bit of a ridiculous note, The Ultimate Skiing Showdown looks to calm audiences’ frayed nerves with a little comedy. Set to the Neil Cicierega song “The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny,” which discusses a fight between Batman and Godzilla, David McMahon’s four-minute goof pays both homage and insult to the sport of cross county—ahem, Nordic—skiing. While the silly song plays, a group of trick-happy skiers bothers, surprises and generally acts the fool in front of a group of less talented, but seemingly reasonable, group of skiers.
The winter Olympics may have introduced Americans to some odd sports. But until there are gold medals given out for the best judged BASE-jump or the fastest climbing route up Half Dome, the Banff Mountain Film Festival will be there to fill in the blanks.
THE BANFF MOUNTAIN FILM FESTIVAL screens Feb. 26-27 at 7pm at the Rio Theatre, 1205 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz, 831.423.8209. Tickets are $15, $12 for students and seniors and are available at the Rio box office or at www.ucscrecreation.com.
