Mountainfilm Blog

Charlie Fowler perished in an avalanche in China in 2006, along with his climbing partner Christine Boskoff. He was a world-class mountaineer and climber, and some of his most noteworthy ascents were with no rope. Rock and Ice lists his accomplishments in detail. Here’s a short sampling:

He soloed David Breashears’ technical Eldo Scarefest Perilous Journey (5.11d X), the Loose Flakes Route (5.10) on the 1,500-foot walls of the Black Canyon, and the 1,800-meter Direct North Face of the Eiger. Fowler’s more conventional climbing resume is mind-blowing — 8,000-meter peaks like Everest without oxygen (and without actually using an ice axe), 5.13 rock, hard bouldering, A4 big walls and myriad first ascents: free, aid, ice and alpine.

To commemorate Veteran’s Day on Sunday, November 11, we're reviewing our archives and the range of films we’ve screened over the years that focus on veterans and their work.

Several of these films look at the challenges veterans face coming back from war. Many of these men and women are gravely injured and must deal with a host of physical and mental disabilities that make reintegration into civilian life difficult. Not surprising to Mountainfilm audiences, a connection with the outdoors can help with the transition.

Two recent films looked at how fly-fishing can be therapeutic. Most recently, we played Not Yet Begun to Fight (2012), which focuses on the work of Colonel Eric Hastings, who created an organization called Warriors and Quiet Waters that brings injured vets returning from Iraq and Afghanistan to Bozeman, Montana, for a week of fly-fishing. There was a similar story that won the festival’s Moving Mountains Prize in 2010 called Fish Out of Water.

Mountainfilm in Telluride festival director David Holbrooke splits his time between Telluride, Colorado and Brooklyn, New York. What follows is his post Sandy dispatch from Brooklyn.

It’s been a little more than a week since Superstorm Sandy walloped the New York, New Jersey and Connecticut tri-state area, and it’s now snowing outside as I write. Suffering from cabin fever, I headed out earlier this evening into our neighborhood. It feels like February and walking past still-closed subway stations, a mid-winter sensation of cold air hit my face, reminding me of ski season.

Photography has always been a form of expression, but more than that, photography can also be a form of activism. Photography is voice. Mountain2Mountain— a nonprofit that was founded upon the ethos of connecting communities and cultures and the belief that the power of voice can create change — is in Afghanistan this fall, exhibiting a traveling show titled “Streets of Afghanistan,” a cultural exhibit of life-size photographs that depict life in Afghanistan as Afghans see it.

Anna Brones is traveling with “Streets of Afghanistan,” along with founder Shannon Galpin, and posting updates on M2M’s website. Here are a few highlights cobbled together from their travel updates:

A week ago, Good Pitch held a gathering in San Francisco that was a platform for documentary filmmakers to network and fundraise. Having leveraged more than $3.4 million from various entities, Good Pitch (which was created by BritDoc and the Sundance Institute) selected seven films in various stages of production from applicants around the world. The filmmaking teams are then invited to present to an audience that is able to support these projects through funding and outreach.

In 2010, Mountainfilm in Telluride examined the issue of extinction for our Moving Mountains Symposium. The list of endangered creatures has been growing for generations, a crisis E.O. Wilson and other scientists say is caused by human destruction to natural habitats.

World governments have committed to try to halt the extinction of species and safeguard important biodiversity sites for nature by 2020, but this promise hasn’t seen much serious number crunching. Until now.

A recent study, published in Science, sets the price at $80 billion per year — the sum of $4 billion annually and another $76 billion to protect and manage key habitats.

Come November 6, in addition to the national election and other state ballot issues, a few million Californians will vote on food. California, long the rebel state that paves the way for the rest of the nation, has Proposition 37 on the menu ballot, which would require that genetically modified (G.M.) foods carry a label.

It seems a simple concept to let people know what they’re eating, but as food author, journalist and activist and Michael Pollan writes in an article titled “Vote for the Dinner Party,” Big Food doesn’t see it that way: