A&E
Outing Club hosts Banff film fest
By Ghada Emish ’19
February 25, 2016
Tags a+e
As a way to celebrate and promote the vigorous spirit of outdoor sports, the Banff Mountain Film Festival World Tour showcased nine short films last Wednesday Feb. 17 about interesting adventures in the wilderness.
Eclipse: This film is the story of Reuben Krabbe’s quest to take a photograph of a person skiing down a mountain in front of the 2015 solar eclipse in Svalbard, in the Arctic Ocean. The irony of Krabbe’s endeavor to embark on a long, exhausting journey for the sake of a 2-and-a-half-minute event seemed so explicit in the way the professional skiers who escorted Krabbe and himself reflected candidly, in the first shot of Eclipse, on the seemingly absurd goal of their journey.
However, the adventurers were able to plan effectively to take the shot, did not approach their goal with undue seriousness and even in their hardest times, when their snow riders were trapped in deep, frozen rainwater, their sense of humor persisted and they dealt with the situation in a realistic way.
Eclipse mostly demonstrates what an incredibly dedicated person Krabbe is, as he approaches his goals with passion and sensibility. He made his goal to take an epic picture so inspiring that, at the end of Eclipse, his endeavor became appreciable and empowering to the audience. The film is available on YouTube under the title Eclipse—Salomon Freeski TV S9 E03.
Unbranded: The the story of four college graduates who decide to take 16 Mustangs in a so-called adventure from Mexico to Canada in 158 days. Although enduring the suffering imposed by spending long days traveling with limited access to food sounds impressive, unfortunately, the makers of Unbranded disregarded the incredible physical suffering that they inflicted on the horses. By placing the heavy weight on the backs of the horses, walking in a hot climate for long days with short breaks and making the horses climb rocky hills, the filmmakers claim that they demonstrated the superior qualities of trained versus domesticated horses. One of the horses slid down a rocky hill while attempting to climb it and was injured in the process, which was not a strong enough clue for the filmmakers to stop the project.
The film’s cruelty climaxed in the death of a mustang for an unspecified reason, an incident after which, ironically, one of the four riders said: “He died a happy horse!” However, happiness seems alien to the context of this “spicy” journey. In my opinion, it is quite absurd on behalf of the Banff Center to have chosen Unbranded among the winners rather than condemn it for torturing the horses for the sake of the filmmakers’ seeking of an empowering experience after finishing college.
unReal: A film that gave an original reflection on real life is unReal. This 11-minute film represents a city as a dark place across a stormy river and contrasted it with the breathtaking green hills on which a person is cycling. The cyclist seemed incredibly engaged in his activity, tempting us, the viewers, to want to leap into the screen and join him. The wilderness conveyed a sense of reality that is a lot more enjoyable and appreciable than the “real world” that is described to us as fast-paced and relentless, that world we fear as we get closer to joining it. The way the city and wilderness scenes were alternated made them speak effectively for themselves, with little script necessary. Other scenes were of many cyclists in a forest passing vibrantly in slow motion, with mud flying after the bicycles. The close-up shots of the mud looked surprisingly beautiful. In this way, the film succeeded in conveying detailed features of the cycling scenes and a strong sense of what the moment offers in that particular forest setting. It became clear that immersion in cycling and mindfulness of what is happening in the scene is what’s truly real, lively and fully elaborated, which made the “real world” seem almost surreal and essentially alien as compared to what most people experience on a daily basis.