Festival Films

JP Auclair teams up with Sherpas Cinema in this short, mind-blowing segment from the 2011 Powder Magazine Movie of the Year All.I.Can to tame the mean streets of British Columbia on skis. You might have seen this footage on your computer, but check it out on the big screen.

This film isn’t really about either baseball or cholera. Instead, it concentrates on the playfulness and joy of the game as it nudges up against and intermingles with the death and despair of the disease after the 2011 earthquake in Haiti.

Omi Vaidya was a struggling actor in Los Angeles, California, who was getting by on commercials and a few small roles. Raised in Palm Springs, he barely spoke Hindi and had little connection to India, the homeland of his parents.

In 2005, photographer James Balog set out on an audacious quest: to document the disappearance of glaciers by setting up time-lapse cameras around the world.

It’s not easy to address the issue of human overpopulation, so filmmaker Mike Freedman did something clever: He told the story with mice. He uses the cautionary tale from a science experiment by John B. Calhoun to show what happens when the rodents are crowded together. It’s not a pretty sight.

When a family of otters move in next door, an anxious rabbit worries about whether they will be nice neighbors.

Ernest Wilkerson is struggling to hold onto an independent lifestyle while facing a changing world and his own advancing age.

“The bad he done was just too much,” says one of the many unforgettable characters in this moving and inspiring documentary about Sierra Leone that manages simultaneously to depict both the absolute worst of human nature and its very best.

Western Spaghetti was at Kidz Kino in 2009. PES returns to serve up another tasty meal with Fresh Guacamole. No one but PES could make grenades, dice, pincushions or chess pieces look so appetizing.

In 2008, Conrad Anker, Jimmy Chin and Renan Ozturk attempted a long-sought-after summit: a highly technical and challenging granite buttress called the Shark’s Fin on the northeast side of the 6,310-meter peak Meru Central in India.

There’s no doubt that traditional ice climbing is a beautiful sport for hardy mountain souls. But because of the physics of ice, it’s virtually impossible to find super hard, overhanging ice routes on natural walls — until now.

Children don’t need shiny plastic things, video games or expensive toys to have fun. A pile of logs and sticks can provide an active imagination with plenty of tools for hours of entertainment.

The scene is set with two young women — Sophie Windsor Clive and Liberty Smith — on a casual canoe trip on the River Shannon in Ireland.

Warren Miller has taken skiers all over the world to rip powder, but few places have been as exotic as Kashmir, India.

Dogs can be man’s cutest best friend, but with the right training, they can also be lifesavers. That’s why local filmmaker Scott Ransom followed the story of an avalanche dog from puppy through its rigorous training with Telluride Ski Patroller Gary Richard.

Shot entirely during what’s called the “magic hour,” cinematographer and editor Ben Sturgulewski of Sweetgrass Productions takes us on a self-powered, all-you-can-shred spine buffett in Haines, Alaska, with skiers Stephan Drake, Forrest Shearer and Johan Jonsson.

Like her hero, the pioneering environmental writer and activist Rachel Carson (author of Silent Spring), Sandra Steingraber is a cancer victim. Diagnosed at age 20, she successfully battled the disease for 30 years.

Since 1996, the Telluride Adaptive Sports Program has been teaching people with disabilities to ski. The organization has grown in scope and scale, and last June, they brought their athletes to Alaska for an immersive high-altitude adventure.

In this world controlled and timed by light, an ordinary man has a plan that could change the natural order of things.

Susan Cohn Rockefeller’s film Making the Crooked Straight, about Dr. Rick Hodes, won the Moving Mountains Prize in 2009. The director returns with a very different film, a personal yet allegorical tale about the state of our troubled oceans.

There are few things more poignant than to see strong brave men and women — warriors, all — reduced by the ravages of combat to brokenness: brokenness not just of the body, but also of the soul.

Like urban mountaineers, the immigrant window washers profiled in this short incisive film rappel down sheer cliffs of city glass.

Inspired by Thor Heyerdahl’s epic Kon-Tiki expedition in 1947 and a cradle-to-cradle, no-waste philosophy, David de Rothschild built a 60-foot boat with a hull made of recycled plastic bottles.

Bike racing in Los Angeles, California? No way. There are too many cars. This may be the illest road race on the planet. Legality is questionable and trying to hold the wheel of the fixie in front might mean a pre-dawn, clandestine and completely certifiable victory.

Were his Olympic speed-skating gold medals in 1994 his only legacy, Norwegian Johann Olav Koss might have just become another athlete living off dusty accomplishments.

Keith “Scramble” Campbell is a live artist who paints during the concerts of jam bands, such as Leftover Salmon.

Mountain biker Ian Killick is featured in this flawless short by Karl Heldt and Matt Miles of Silvia Films.

Punk rock and human rights don’t necessarily share a common cause, but in the case of the band Blackfire, their music and their message are two integral parts of a solid and strong identity.

The waters surrounding the island of South Georgia are as treacherous as any on the planet. Even at the most inviting times of year, winds are apt to top hurricane force and roughly coax dark ocean swells to a riotous crescendo. Not surprisingly, no one had ever solo-kayaked around the island.

It was a good idea in theory. Climbers Hazel Findlay, Alex Honnold, James Pearson and Mark Synnott struck out for a remote bay in Newfoundland to establish new trad routes on a massive granite wall that juts 1,200 feet out of the ocean.

In 2011, The North Face assembled an eclectic team of athletes for a ski expedition up Denali, the hulking 20,320-foot mountain that rises from a snow-clad range in Alaska’s interior.

Click here for description of the film.

Todd McGrain believes that forgetting is a type of cultural extinction, so he aims to keep memories alive for five extinct North American birds by placing large, bronze sculptures of them in the places where these creatures were last seen alive in the wild.

What can you do on a bicycle? For Guillaume Blanchet, the question is what can’t you do? In this two-minute homage to bikes and the bike obsessed, Blanchet eats, sleeps, showers, shaves, works, cooks and even dates — all from atop his man-powered machine.

By 2010, only two of the world’s 50 highest mountains remained unclimbed. In The Old Breed, veteran climbers Mark Richey and Steve Swenson — who are both in their 50s — set their sights on the taller of the two, Saser Kangri II, which rises from the Indian Ocean to 7,518 meters.

“You shouldn’t have to convince people to go to paradise,” says Yosemite National Park Ranger Shelton Johnson. As an African American, he is unsettled by the fact that only 1 percent of those who visit Yosemite share his race.

"The Blues will never go away, but we are at the threshold of the last of the generations of the guys who were there — who were actually there when the art form was being created," says a character in True Delta.

“This is the story of how we begin to remember,” sings Paul Simon on the seminal album Graceland. Yet 25 years after that album’s release, we’ve begun to forget how much controversy his South African-based project generated by breaking various cultural embargoes.

Sender Films has had a regular presence at Mountainfilm over the last several years with King Lines (2008), Alone on the Wall (2010) and Sketchy Andy (2012).

What Happened on Pam Island is a love story between two Polish alpinists on an extraordinary expedition.