Union Chapel
London
24 February 2012
The UK tour of the Banff Mountain Film Festival is a selection of short films taken from the main Banff Film Festival which runs in Canada in November each year, bringing together a range of outdoor and mountain culture films.
The films selected for the UK tour covered a range of sports, including free skiing in Canada, kayaking (with truly dire results) in crocodile infested waters in central Africa, bouldering (aged 9) in the US, mountaineering in Pakistan (complete with frozen beards and a bit of sobbing), cycling (into thin air off tall platforms, sort of like a cartoon), and perhaps most extraordinary, highlining (naked). As you can imagine none of these are activities that I would ever under any circumstances contemplate, and I sat there in a sort of horrified fascination as a diverse group of extremely enthusiastic but possibly unhinged people did dangerous and frequently pointless things with great passion and commitment, dying in the process in one case. The films brought to life another world, a world of which I really have no experience, and as such, they were interesting and intriguing. But made as they were (on the whole, anyway) by the sporting protagonists themselves, they had the feel of a long reel of holiday films - "this is me, in my backyard, performing an impossible feat, and here's me performing another impossible feat, and oh yes, this is me, doing something spectacularly impossible". You get the gist.
I'm glad I went as it did make me see how the other half (or rather, the other 1%) lives. But I'm fairly sure that in any other walk of life, people with that sort of attitude might in fact be sectioned. It's a strange world...!
SB
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