Banff Mountain Film Festival 2009, night #2

Well, was back at it again last night. Seven more films, and again, pretty good.

Opened with The Red Helmet again, and then moved on to If You're Not Falling, an eight-minute UK film about Sonnie Trotter (cutie :-) ) tackling a wicked hard climb in Scotland. As he said at one point, "I don't mind falling. If you're not falling, you're not trying hard enough." Hmmmmm.... I need to fall more...

Journey to the Center (yes, they used and American spelling...sheesh!) was 55 minutes of documentary about three base jumpers doing a jump into Tian Keng (The Heavenly Pit) in the middle of China. I liked the actual elements of this film that had to do with the adventure, and the segment with the school kids and the Aussie was pretty funny, but this one was feeling a bit self-absorbed at the beginning as they featured each of the jumpers, first with the other two jumpers saying why the jumper in question was so amazing (yeah, ok... move on), followed by the jumper himself telling his base-jumping story/history. Maybe it's just me, but my advise would be this: Dudes, you do an extreme sport that most people are going to think is pretty out-there and amazing that you do it in the first place. Just give the facts (or better yet, have a narrator give the facts) of what you've done. The audience will quickly come to the right conclusion that you're good, without having your mates gush how good you are.

Moved on to Crux, featuring 12 minutes of the typical mountain-bike acrobatics that I personally find pretty amazing. That these guys can stay so balanced on such thin bits of... bits... is amazing! And the film showed a number of goofs before getting it right, which I thought was good and made it that much more real. Loved the final scene where he's riding along a chain hung between the two ends of two concrete highway dividers over a span of about five or six meters, and then says into the camera, "Did that really just happen?"

Silent Snow was a thought-provoking piece about Greenland, and how it's turning into our pollution filter, with the result that toxins are permeating all living things there, including the people. Not such a good thing.

The Sharp End: Eastern Europe was 17 minutes of nerve-wracking, palm-sweating, "no f**kin' way!"ing footage of a group of American trad climbers going to climb trad without using metal trad gear on hard-assed climbed that even on a good day with the best gear I'd be looking at and saying, "Yeah, right!" Instead they were using knotted tech cord, jamming knots into crevasses with pointy sticks, or passing loops through natural holes and tunnels in the rock, and then attaching slings to those, and, of course, falling on that. Can you say, "insane!" boys and girls?

The last one was a pretty cool 25 minutes about back-country winter action sports and avalanches called The Fine Line. Some pretty wild stories from the avalanche survivors, some awesome footage, and a cool, time-lapsed travel-around-the-world-watch-all-the-seasons-change-in-a-few-seconds bit.

So, that was last night. Back tonight for #3.