Banff Film Festival brings outdoors to big screen

For the second straight year, the Banff Mountain Film Festival showed to a sold-out audience Sunday in Bloomington’s Buskirk-Chumley Theater as part of the festival’s world tour.

The festival, a showing of films about the outdoors and adventure sports, made its seventh appearance in Bloomington as part of the festival’s 33rd year.

“The Sharp End” is a full-length documentary about bouldering and rock climbing, but only two segments were shown. The Eastern Europe segment documented an American group’s visit to the Czech Republic, where they climbed the Adrspach-Teplice rocks, a set of sandstone formations reaching heights of hundreds of feet.

“That was tremendous,” Bloomington resident Rick Turney said. “It was exploring the outer edges of adventure that we don’t get to see very often.”

The other “Sharp End” segment featured rock-climber Lisa Rands scaling boulders.
Overall, the two segments brought a “unique twist to rock climbing,” said graduate student Devin Cramer, who helped organize the event.

The other film Cramer singled out for praise was “The Red Helmet.” Having seen a preview of it as part of the selection process, he said he was “pleasantly surprised by how it surpassed my expectations.”

“The Red Helmet” was created for the 2008 Nissan Outdoor Games, a challenge involving teams of athletes with five days to create a short film featuring mountain biking, kayaking, climbing, BASE jumping and paragliding. It was a finalist for best film on mountain sports and best short film at Banff.

The featured film was “Red Gold,” which documented the controversy caused by the proposed Pebble Mine in the Bristol Bay region of Alaska.

Bristol Bay is one of the world’s most prosperous salmon habitats, and many of the local residents rely on salmon as a major source of food. However, the mine would create a potential for environmental harm.

The Pebble Partnership, the group behind the mine, is in the process of conducting environmental studies that began in May 2008 and will continue through 2010 before the mine can be approved.

Other films featured trail biking, kayaking and backcountry skiing.

Skiier Greg Hill made his debut at Banff this year after picking up a camera for the first time in November 2007 and recording “The Unbearable Lightness of Skiing.” He documented his backcountry skiing excursions in the Canadian Rockies in the film.

“It was eye-opening,” said Bloomington resident Dan Taylor, who attended the festival for his third time.