DEFINING HIGH CULTURE
An estimated 20,000 enthusiasts will descend on Banff over the next nine days to take in a variety of films, books and talks as part of the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival. Now in its 42nd year, the event remains the largest mountain culture festiva
The scope of the films, like mountain culture in general, has expanded over the past 42 years.
“The availability of filmmaking equipment and accessibility to editing programs has really made filmmaking accessible to a bunch of people,” says Joanna Croston, program director of the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival.
“We are seeing all different types of stories being told now. Initially, when we started the festival, everything was on reels. You were relying on pretty high production to hold a festival. Now you can quite literally have an up-and-coming filmmaker who has created something at home.”
Here are five things to check out.
FILMS
Hundreds of filmmakers from 36 countries submitted entries into the festival. Eighty-two of them will be screened and will vie for 11 film awards, in categories that include Exploration and Adventure, Mountain Culture, Climbing, Mountain Sports, Snow Sports, Mountain Environment and Natural History, Best Short, Best Feature Length and the Award for Creative Excellence and the People’s Choice awards. That includes a number of locally shot films with local topics. Canmore filmmaker Leanne Allison will screen Living with Wildlife, which focuses on how grizzly bears and humans coexist in the Bow Valley. Dominique Keller’s Bison Return chronicles the reintroduction of Bison to Banff National Park.
BOOKS
Books play an equal role in the festival and authors will also be vying for prizes. There have been 161 entries from 11 countries competing for eight prizes. The type of books run the gamut, reflecting the festival’s expanded scope to include not just climbing and mountaineering but wildlife studies and general adventure. For instance, Douglas Chadwick’s Tracking Gobi Grizzlies focuses on the National Geographic reporter’s portrait of the grizzlies’ fight for survival in a harsh environment. Former Calgarian Mike Spencer Bown’s The World’s Most Travelled Man follows his globe-trotting hitchhiking adventures around the world since 1990. Banff’s Bernadette McDonald will present her cleverly subtitled latest, Art of Freedom: The Life and Climbs of Voytek Kurtyka, which chronicles the exploits of the great Polish alpinist.
ART/ EXHIBITIONS
Not surprisingly, the beauty of the mountains can be a fairly generous muse for artists. Exhibits will be held throughout the nine-day festival, covering a wide array of topics and mediums. Photographer Renan Ozturk’s The Last Honey Hunter is a film that chronicles a man’s death-defying hunt for psychotropic honey in Nepal. American artist Sarah Uhl’s Love Letters from the Land features the painter’s desperate plea to the government for land preservation. In The Land That Shaped Us, U.K. artist Tessa Lyons will be creating work onsite at the Banff Centre, painting some of the festival’s speakers in her makeshift studio and placing them amid the mountainous backdrop that has most influenced their lives and careers.
GUDRUN PFLUGER AND CONSTANZA CERUTI.
These two women will be among the guests offering a glimpse into some very unique vocations. An Austrian athlete, author, biologist and cancer survivor, Pfluger moved to Canada and spent five weeks tracking coastal wolves along the Pacific Coast. After being diagnosed with brain cancer, she immersed herself in her environment and work in Alberta and B.C., eventually penning the memoir Wolf Spirit: A Story of Healing, Wolves and Wonder. Argentinean Constanza Ceruti is the only female Andean high-altitude archeologist in the world and has studied the Inca in some of the highest Andean peaks.
TERRY MCDONELL
Having been founding editor of Outside, a magazine that began as the brainchild of Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner for offthe-grid backpackers and adventurers, Terry McDonell has been immersed in wildlife of various sorts. That includes experiences not only with Wenner, but also Hunter S. Thompson and the late environmentalist and anarchist Edward Abbey. He chronicles his career in the book The Accidental Life: An Editor’s Notes on Writing and Writers and will be in discussion with the Banff Centre’s Mountain and Wilderness Writing Program faculty editor Marni Jackson on Nov. 4.
The Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival will run at the Banff Centre until Nov. 5. Visit banffcentre.ca.