Nearly a month and a half ago, one of our friends sent us a Facebook invite to an Outdoor Film Festival, and I remember thinking, hmmm late November... and it's going to be outside? It turns out, the film festival is about outdoor films, specifically adventure sports short films. Festival is a traveling production, a big thing that plays across Europe and sponsored by outdoorsy corporations like Mammut and North Face and Victorianox etc.
Our friend got us tickets to the sold out performance in Stuttgart, which cost about $20. It was less about our desire to see adventure sports films than the enthusiasm of our friends, to speak plainly.
On arrival at the venue, most people there were wearing extremely sporty clothing. Wool coats like mine were few and far between compared to the sea of Gore-Tex and hiking boots.
There were nine of us so we had to grab seats at the very very top row of the top balcony. I actually didn't mind so much being more removed from the screen.
The best thing you could say about the films were that they were short. They mostly fell into two categories: overly long music videos featuring spliced together clips of people doing extreme sports with no apparent coherance or narrative, and longer, more narrative films about people who work very hard to do stupid things. The first category was just insipid, just a few moments of nice images or concept. The four most notable films from the latter catorgy were:
A guy climbs a big mountain in Mexico without a rope. This was actually my favorite. Straightforward, simple, and you hear the climber and the videographer/route prep guy talk about it.
An ice climber pressing his aging condition (and luck) attempts to set and climb a big waterfall in the middle of winter in British Columbia. The best thing about it was the way the German subtitles dropped his frequent and colorful exclamations.
Four grrrrls attempt to paddle from Mongolia to the Pacific via some rivers. Good! Travel adventure! This was almost my favorite until it devolved into being about feelings. The feelings were so high that one of the girls left halfway to go home based on feelings with lots of hand-wringing all around, and then due to flooding and Russia being Russia they pretty much all ended up flying home after the halfway mark anyway.
A British high school dropout likes to climb very tall construction cranes and hang off them to the horror of his mother, who claims that she can't do anything about it. After doing some more stupid, suicidal things in the Ukraine, he beings to think about how his mom might feel about the matter. I guess Parkour is outdoor adventure sports, so it squeaks in. My second favorite in the fest, actually.
I don't really get the appeal of the film fest, actually. I think the whole thing is more of a scene the more I think about it, like a place be a big adventure sports enthusiast. Here I am, celebrating Adventure Sports with my fellow sporting types.
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