Review: Banff Mountain Film Festival 2018, Victoria Rooms

Watching the latest and best cinematic output from Canada’s best-known mountain resort now feels like an annual rite of passage for many of Bristol’s Gore-Tex-glad middle class mountaineers. Given this particular festival’s pedigree, though, perhaps that’s not unreasonable: The winning films have been touring worldwide since 2010 with the festival itself active since 1976.

As in previous years there are two programmes on offer, and I attended the Red screening, with seven out of a total of sixteen films on offer. First up was Tom Wallisch’s generously-conceived Imagination. A young child stuck in the back of his parents’ car decides to deal with his boredom by conjuring up an outlandishly good skier sliding and jumping alongside the vehicle, blasting his way over roofs, driveways and gardens. Pulling this off whilst fitting in an endless array of stunts that even a video game character would struggle to keep up with makes for an extraordinary watch, however it’s all too easy to imagine seeing this piece appear in a high budget commercial – probably at the multiplex, advertising a top-drawer German SUV.

In all fairness, the key reason for this is the use of a child’s imagination as a framing device, in which context the skiing sequence itself ought not to be judged. It’s a brilliant set of stunts, with an urban environment giving it a USP other snowsports films don’t generally offer – and given that I genuinely thought much of it was the product of some exceptional CGI (it wasn’t, of course), it’s not hard to appreciate that the action itself is enough to make it a worthwhile five minutes.

Next up came Edges, a profile of US skater Yvonne Dowlen. With no scenic vistas, imminent injury or risk of violent death to work with, director Katie Stjernholm had her work cut out – but thankfully Dowlen is such a compelling subject that a straight face–to-face interview interspersed with clips of her skating would have been enough. We got so much more, though, and as with many films from the Banff Festival it’s the ones you don’t expect to deliver that really hit the spot.

Another short followed, with Intersection giving a five minute glimpse into the world of mountain biker Micayla Gatto. When not bouncing around on muddy and rocky trails Gatto likes to paint, and Lacy Kemp’s credible view into both sides of h er life makes for a colourful experience, if somewhat unexpected for an audience wondering when its subject was going to beat us into submission with a death-defying bike stunt.Kemp has made a stunning-looking looking film, though for me I suspect there were enough biking-themed visual treats on the table without needing to showcase Gatto’s other talent in any way whatsoever.

With the shorts out of the way, it was time to enjoy the first feature: Into Twin Galaxies sees Ben Stookesberry, Sarah McNair-Landry and Erik Boomer use kite skis and kayaks to navigate their way across 1,000 km of the Greenland Ice Cap. This is more familiar Banff Festival territory, with excellent direction from Jochen Small backed up by production from Red Bull Media House. During the trek McNair-Landry hurts her back and simply carries on regardless, even when the stupendously vicious waterfalls they’re aiming for – and intend to kayak down – start to appear. Turns out this wasn’t a sprain or a damaged disc: she’d actually broken several vertebra. This revelation serves as a remarkable coda to a very watchable film – it was just incredible that no-one else got hurt or drowned on a set of waterfalls that in some cases were so bereft of flow that anyone else would at least want a diamond-bottomed kayak before proceeding.

After a well-timed interval with various prize draw winners announced and freebies from various sponsors tossed around the audience, we sat down for a short piece showing us the dangerous existence of the Arabian ibex. It was wonderful – but it was also a BBC film narrated by David Attenborough. What it was doing here remains a mystery, but the organisers risk losing serious amounts of credibility if they do anything like this again.

Redemption came, thankfully, with The Frozen Road. If anyone was ripe to film themselves on an epic adventure challenge then it had to be Yorkshire’s Ben Page. Balancing the expected can-do spirit with a likeable vulnerability gave this trek across the Canadian Yukon a uniquely British feel, with the terrain he’d chosen upping the drama to give us an exceptionally well-executed fish-out-of-water tale. Page tried to pedal his way across hundreds of miles of ice and snow with only a handful of villages to stop at on the way, a tent, little in the way of mobile supplies – and , of course, no camera crew to help him out. No wonder, then, that things went more than a little wrong. Wondering whether Page’s bodyweight was the only thing stopping his tent blowing away as he failed to get any sleep was bad enough; when the pack of wolves that locals had warned him about started howling, it seemed almost amusingly disastrous – presumably only because we know he made it back home.
Quite how close this mission really did come to turning into an icy version of The Blair Witch Project is debatable, but the joy on Page’s face when he was rescued by some locals – who clearly knew he was out of his depth – was unmistakably real, sending him out an impressive on comedic high that transcended his failure to make it to the end alone several times over.

To finish, we were treated to Cedar Wright and Taylor Keating’s Stumped, a 25 minute glimpse into the life of one-armed climber Maureen Beck. As with all of the better material at this screening, there was a decent narrative on offer showing that a difficult challenge amid great scenery isn’t the be-all-and-end-all of a quality activity sports film. The black humour started early with Beck making up some inspired lies about how she lost her arm,  before telling us she was born without it. We then get to watch her try and scale the same piece of rock and fail repeatedly, part-way through which I was on the edge of my seat – in fear of no monster, but of the genuine frustration fizzing off the screen as she kept on failing.

Eventually she expanded her schedule to include arduous formal training sessions, cut out the booze and cupcakes and finally made it. It’s a testament to Wright and Keating’s skill that on top of making us root for Beck more than England against Germany in a World Cup final, at no point did they let this film veer into made-for-TV territory.

In recent years competition for this event from the likes of Mountains on Stage and Reel Rock 11 has shown the authorities in Banff that they can’t take their position for granted, and given a couple of the shorter films on offer I do wonder whether offering two evenings of films is stretching things a little thin. Nonetheless there was a vast amount to enjoy here, with none of the lengthier material falling below par. I’ll be back at next year, and hopefully pick my night based on reviews from other stops on the tour.