I went to an evening of films from last year's Kendal Mountain Film Festival, being held in support of charity Porters Progress, held at the Royal Geographical Society. Comfy seats, but no popcorn. I am planning to go to the festival this year, and wanted to see what types of films are shown. In total there were 11 films shown, varying from the six minute long MedeoZ to the 30 minute long Wild Water. All of them had some elements of interest - mostly to do with the beauty / danger of the mountains, but I felt that some of them lacked real human interest. For example, Wild Water had some stunnign footage of kayaking down some really extreme rivers, which to my eyes looked pretty death defying. However, I didn't find the clips where the participants were talkign about their motivations to be particualrly interesting. In contrast, I saw the film Blindsight at the London Film Festival a few years ago. It profiled the attempt by blind American climber Erik Weihenmayer (who has summited Everst in addition to many other large mountains) to lead a group of blind and partially sighted Tibetan young people up a mountain beside Everest - to be fair it was a full length documentary and you really got to understand some of the the human stories, in addition to seeing some of the mountain beauty.
One highlight of the evening was seeing a film called The Swiss Machine (which won the award of Best Mountaineering Film at the festival last year) about Ueli Steck, who is a Swiss speed mountaineer, and has set the record for the ascent of the Eiger at 2hours 47 minutes. Pretty awe inspiring but slightly mad too! Another amusing one was "A short ski in the Hindu Kush" which profiled the attempt to go ski-ing in a remote part of Afghanistan - again quite zany, but inspiring as well - as the filmaker said herself, she is passionate about ski-ing, and it is importnat that people follow their passions!
No comments:
Post a Comment