watch

It’s movie season. Shorter days and holiday family time beg for cozying up on the sofa and watching some good flicks.

With that in mind, we’ve compiled dozens of shorts that screened at the 2011 and 2012 Mountainfilm in Telluride festivals. All you need to do is bookmark this page of shorts. Then, click on “film details” for any film you care to watch, and the film will play in a new window.

(If you like these films, please let us know, and we will go deeper into our archives to bring you more Mountainfilm movies.)

Don’t forget the popcorn.

From China to Sierra Leone, Mountainfilm on Tour covers the globe. This weekend, Friday through Sunday (November 30-December 2), we'll be in Mill Valley, California, and hope to see the Bay Area show up en masse to see some special guests and films. Check out the Mill Valley schedule and purchase tickets. This trailer is a sneak preview of what to expect at the Throckmorton Theatre this weekend.

For the last eight years, National Geographic has combed the globe to find Adventurers of the Year, each selected for his or her extraordinary achievement in exploration, conservation, humanitarianism or adventure sports.

This year, Nat Geo focused on people who are adventure innovators: a surfer riding giants, a skier landing the first sit-ski backflip, a mountain biker pedaling across cultural boundaries, a BASE jumper falling from space and others. Out of their 10 adventurers this year, three have been guests of Mountainfilm in Telluride (Josh Dueck, Shannon Galpin, and Renan Ozturk), where we hope you had the opportunity to meet them in person.

From now until January 16, 2013, Nat Geo invites you to vote (once a day if you like) for the person who you think best embodies the spirit of adventure. The one with the most votes will earn the new People's Choice Adventurer of the Year.

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:

Mountainfilm in Telluride 2012 focused on population, and although the Moving Mountains Symposium is over, we’re not closing the door on the discussion. It’s a many-layered subject and affects most every ecosystem on the planet.

In this video, Joel Cohen, a professor of populations at Rockefeller and Columbia Universities (who couldn’t make it to our symposium), outlines the complexity of the topic while simultaneously simplifying the difficult subject.

Before you begin, a few caveats:

1. The video is 43 minutes.
2. The intended audience is students who might consider demography as a course of study, but the sales pitch on either end is brief.

If the caveats deter you in any way from setting aside 43 minutes to watch, here are a few incentives to counteract them:

During the Stone Age, Homo habilis apparently created and used tools. It could be argued that this was the beginning of man’s affinity for stuff. Tools were, and are, valuable and worth carting around from place to place. Speaking of carting, it’s stuff that was the impetus behind the invention of the wheel in the late Neolithic era. Wheels were used to make pottery — ahem, more stuff — and to build horse-driven chariots to carry stuff.

While tools and wheels are pretty fundamental items, many of the things we purchase today are not as necessary. At Mountainfilm in Telluride 2012, we showed Living Tiny, a film about downsizing living spaces. In it, one character says, “ People like having lots of stuff, Americans in particular. Ultimately, you can only occupy 12 square feet of space at a time. Everything else is just a place to keep your stuff.”

Photographer Aaron Huey has showcased his work at Mountainfilm in Telluride several times. Most recently, in 2011, he spoke about his long-time project on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. This work garnered him the attention of the programmers at TED who featured his talk on their website.

Huey’s photos of the hard life on the reservation are now featured in National Geographic with an extraordinary layout. There is also a new short film (below) about this work, where he states that he realized he had to stop being an observer and “take sides.”

British-American photojournalist Tim Hetherington was known for capturing the interior world of soldiers and mixing it with the exterior violence of their everyday lives. Between 2007 and 2008, he was embedded with U.S. Army soldiers of the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team at Outpost Restrepo, a remote post in northeastern Afghanistan and the namesake of a documentary film that heco-directed with Sebastian Junger. Restrepo played at Mountainfilm in Telluride 2010, won the 2010 Sundance Film Festival’s Grand Jury Prize and was nominated for an Academy Award in 2011.

Hetherington was killed in Misrata, Libya, in April of 2011 when a motor hit near where he was working. He planned to attend Mountainfilm the following month with a short documentary he made called Diary, which he described as “highly personal and experimental.”

While in medical school at Harvard, Geoff Tabin applied for a leave of absence because he wanted to join a climbing expedition for a first ascent up the east face of Mount Everest. For this career-arresting request, an ophthalmologist called him a “moron” and steered him, instead, toward a high-altitude ophthalmologist research project in Nepal. Thus, by merging climbing with ophthalmology, Tabin managed to complete medical school and discover his two callings (curing people with preventable blindness and being the fourth person in the world to climb all seven summits).