Film & Book Festival Highlights

The first weekend of the Banff Mountain Film & Book Festival is almost upon us, and the schedule as always is packed full of interesting films, talks and seminars. From the amazing choice of exciting movies and inspirational speakers, we have drawn up our own shortlist of ‘must see’ events:

On Nov 1st and 2nd the festival starts with 3 feature length movies each day at noon, 3.30pm and 7.30pm. Movies that caught our eye for Saturday are Committed 2: Grit Kids, Grand Canyon Adventure — River at Risk, and Stranded — I’ve Come from a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains. On Sunday, fans of climbing films will be eager to attend the 3.30pm show which features 2 rock climbing movies, The Sharp End and Spray: Window of Opportunity plus the mountain biking movie Latitudes. Also Zum Dritten Pol at the 7.30pm show looks like a very interesting film about 1930s mountaineering in the Himalayas.

Our next choice is the annual Radical Reels film on Nov 4th at 7.30pm, which shows a collection of adrenalin filled mountain sports movies.

On Nov 5th the book festival starts with talks from Sid Marty and John Vaillant. Sid Marty should be particularly interesting for Banff locals, as he has written several excellent books about this part of the Canadian Rockies, and will be reading from his latest book The Black Grizzly of Whiskey Creek, a true account of a spell of horrific bear attacks one summer in the town of Banff.

The opening of the main film festival at 8pm Nov 7th will see Austrian mountaineer Peter Habeler talk to a packed crowd in the Eric Harvie Theatre, hopefully relating some of his experiences with climbing partner Reinhold Messner, with whom he pioneered alpine style climbing and made the first ascent of Everest without supplemental oxygen.

Our choice of the daytime screenings on Nov 8th and 9th is program B, and in particular Chadar — The Ice Trail about an isolated region of the Himalayas with an 8 month winter, Return to Nepal where musician Bruce Cockburn goes back to Nepal after a 20 year absence to see how life has changed there, and finally The Fine Line which promises an interesting spin on avalanche education with a combination of skiers, climbers and avalanche experts.

The team at banff.mobi will be attending several events ourselves and during the course of the festival we will be adding reviews to the site of some of the best movies and speakers, so stay tuned!

See the full film and book festival schedule and purchase tickets at the Banff Centre Website.

If you have your own list of favorites, or other views about the festival, please feel free to leave us a comment below.