I’ve been inspired for three days now, full of dreams of the mountains and adventures and freedom, thinking back to places I’ve been and those that capture my imagination and call out to me to visit.
It’s pretty much the way I feel every year for a week or so after the Banff Mountain Film Festival comes to town. I’ve been going to the festival for years now – five of the last six I think -- and have sought it out in Kingston, Barrie and Toronto, depending on the location closest to wherever I happened to be living at the time. It’s always been worth the drive and never fails to leave me dreaming of a better life.
That’s how I feel now, after my brother Ben and I attended the festival last Saturday at the Bloor Cinema.
The festival ran three nights in a row here in Toronto, with a different lineup of adventure or outdoors-inspired films each night, running over about a four-hour span.
The roster typically includes a mix of six or seven Canadian and international films, ranging from a couple of minutes in length to an hour or so, and there are usually a couple of slightly eccentric entries that don’t fit neatly into the genre, but usually still work pretty well with the overall theme.
There were three films this year that really captured my imagination and have occupied my thoughts for nearly a week now.
The first was called “Asiemut,” a film made by a young couple from Quebec as they travelled by bicycle through (check my geography) Mongolia, China, Tibet, Nepal and India – 8,000 kilometres – and got through thick and thin together and came out stronger on the other side. A truly inspiring film and a really likeable pair of Quebecois (not that that’s unusual.)
The second, and this fits in the category of “Adventure?? Film” is called “The Ride of the Merganser. Mergansers are a diving duck that call, among other places, the northwestern portion of the Great Lakes region of Canada and the U.S. home.
They’re pretty elusive and as such there isn’t a ton of footage of them in their natural habitat – and there’s definitely nothing like this. ROTM, a 15 minute film, follows a female as she lays eggs, hatches her ducklings, and urges them one by one to make the long leap from the nest down to the pond below – all in the space of 24 hours.
It’s so cool! Clever narration, a smart soundtrack and brilliant use of remote cameras make this one of the most purely entertaining films of the festival, for sure.
But my far-and-away favourite was undoubtedly “First Ascent: Didier versus The Cobra.”
Most of this hour-long film takes place in Squamish, B.C., and centres around Didier Berthod, a Swiss rock climber, and his attempts to climb “The Cobra” – a section of rock split from top to bottom by a narrow crack just large enough to get a toe and a couple of fingers into in places, and possibly the toughest crack climb in the world.
But the documentary-style film quickly becomes about more than achieving that one finite goal. Didier, who is living at a youth hostel and cleaning rooms to pay for his stay so he can hang around and climb, is instantly lovable, and the film-maker does an incredible job of bringing us into Didier’s life and showing us who he is, beyond being a world-class climber who appears to have been born on a rock somewhere.
At one point he tells the camera “I’m a Christian, but not a very good one,” and you can’t help but admire his ability to wear his heart on his sleeve.
The film follows Didier as he attempts, over and over again, to scale The Cobra (which had never been climbed), to the heartbreaking moment when he fails on his very last attempt before he has to fly home to Switzerland.
The story then takes us to Europe, where he climbs the toughest crack-climb in Europe, but only after Didier – a pure traditionalist -- removes the bolts that someone has driven into the rock to make the climb easier.
Then, after a year, he comes back to Squamish, and your pulse begins to quicken as you anticipate, finally, his success on the still-unclimbed route.
But like a quick-draw coming loose it all comes crashing down on his first day back, when he injures his knee and learns he won’t be climbing for months.
Then Didier has an epiphany, explaining that he had convinced himself his desire to climb The Cobra, to be the first, was the natural result of his love of the outdoors and the connection he feels to the rock.
But now, he says, he realizes it was all about “the glory.” He wanted to be the first. He wanted to be the best, and God used the opportunity to humble him.
“It’s as if He was saying ‘No Didier, it’s not for you,’” he says. And there were moments, at “the crux” of the climb – a one-finger hold that transitions to a slippery overhanging right-hand hold, where he felt as if the angels were gently pushing him down, because they knew it wasn’t his time.
“So, instead, I am here to be God’s witness,” Didier says with his typical, simple wisdom that runs deep.
Ahh man, it’s a beautiful film, and even writing about it makes me want to go out and climb a rock, or paint a picture or write a poem or move back to Banff.
See, that’s why I’ve driven halfway across the province to attend the BMFF – because it always breaks my heart and makes me cry and in the words of the great Wade Davis, helps me “understand what it means to be human, and to be alive.”
I’m getting carried away but you get the idea. If you like the outdoors, or have the tiniest remnant of an adventurous spirit left in your black corporate soul, or if you just need to escape this damn city and you don’t have the means to get out – do yourself a huge favour and go to the festival next year.
You won’t regret it.
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