Tour Films

23 Feet is film about a community of people who make the conscious choice to live simply to do what they love in the great outdoors. Three women set out across the west in their 23 foot, 1970 Airstream to search for the stories of people who have turned their backs on the creature comforts of society to live in school buses, vans, and other small spaces.

Aki Ra was handling weapons by age five. By age ten, he was shooting people. Kidnapped as a child and conscripted to serve in Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge army, it was kill or be killed for the young boy. After surviving two decades of wartime soldiering, Aki Ra is now living a very different life. First introduced to Mountainfilm audiences in 2003 with Richard Fitoussi’s short film, Aki’s Story, a fuller and updated version of Aki Ra’s quest for redemption is presented in A Perfect Soldier.

Deep in the vibrant jungle, a little, hungry, green frog is having some trouble finding a meal. Enter a fat, blue friend to help him out, some big scary predators, and a twist at the end to make everything all right again.

What is the true call of the wild? Here we travel down a very special river and are introduced to a wide variety of animal kingdom members, each of whom contributes their name for the sake of music. Look for the monk-ey.

Telluride local Kim Havell teamed up with Kris Erickson and Chris Rubens to explore the far reaches of Morocco’s skiing, including some turns on the second highest peak in Northern Africa.

In Chasing Water, photojournalist Peter McBride sets out to document the flow of the Colorado River from source to sea. A Colorado native, McBride hails from a ranching family that depends on the Colorado for irrigation, and this is the story of his backyard. His simple desire is to find out where the irrigation water of his youth went after his family used it, and how long it took the water to reach the ocean.

Ascending an 8,000-meter peak is never easy. In winter, with temperatures plummeting to 30 below and colder and with snowstorms raging, it is nearly unthinkable. In fact, of the seventeen efforts to ascend an 8,000-meter peak in Pakistan in winter only one has been successful. That winter ascent of Gasherbrum II by Simone Moro, Denis Urubko and Cory Richards is the subject of Cold.

Surf photographer Mickey Smith artfully crafts and narrates an immensely powerful and brooding glimpse at some of Ireland’s heaviest, and coldest, waves.

Sweetgrass Productions (Mountainfilm 2010, Signatures) offers a poetic ski film set to the haunting Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes song, “Desert Song.” The film provides a glimpse into the beauty of late season skiing in Haines, Alaska, as well as the extreme turns that still can be had as evenings deepen with long spring shadows.

The team behind Stone River (Mountainfilm 2010) and Orion magazine bring us this short film, which, simple, balanced and richly shot, is fully consonant with its theme of nature’s timeless cycles, unchanging truths and abundance. Watch the Delaware River as it flows around, past and through an ancient stone weir designed by a decidedly old-school fisherman to catch migrating eels.

Heath Calhoun would never wish his experience on anyone but somehow, he considers his experience a blessing—which is not what you would expect from someone who lost both legs from a rocket attack in Iraq. The lesson Calhoun has taken from his disability is that the human body can go a lot farther than we imagine. On a Wounded Warriors-sponsored trip to Aspen, Calhoun discovered mono-skiing. Within four years, he was competing for the U.S. in the Paralympics. Along the way he learned that his spirit had gained far more than his body had lost.

Longtime filmmakers, as well as longtime locals, Beth and George Gage (Mountainfilm 2011, Bidder 70) traveled to New York City to tell the story of several women who lost their husbands on September 11, 2001. The film shows how these widows, many of them married to firefighters, have moved forward with their lives bravely and the best they can in the ten years since that hellish day.

Ship breaking, or scrapping, is a dangerous business with severe health and environmental hazards. As a result, the industry now resides almost exclusively in developing countries, notably in India and Pakistan where risks of personal injury lawsuits and workers’ health claims are virtually absent. Like water wearing away rock, a sea of men and boys, armed only with rudimentary tools, swarms the derelict hulls and decks and engine rooms and slowly they break down beached leviathan tankers and cargo chips.

If you know Roko Belic–a longtime Mountainfilm regular who along with his brother Adrian is one of the filmmakers behind Genghis Blues–he seems like a pretty happy guy (especially after the birth of his daughter Viva Paradise Firth Belic on March 27). You may not need to be happy to make a film called Happy, but it must have helped Belic as this fine documentary is infused with wisdom and warmth and abounds with life lessons.

In this spot-on parody, “I Know What You Spilled Last Summer” features four young oil executives, including a Jennifer Love Hewitt lookalike(ish) trying to cover up a terrible disaster.

Prompted by the death of a climbing friend, mountain guide and filmmaker Hugh Barnard sets out to discover just what it is that drives a certain type of person into the mountains. Who is it that ignores risk and responsibility for the thrill of the ascent? His exploration uncovers some surprising revelations, such as the fact that climbers—who often describe their endeavors in terms of spirituality and transcendence—rank very low in terms of religious sentiment.

This marks the third year that Interviews 50 Cents, the quirky series of conversations with Alex Chadwick, will screen at Mountainfilm. Unfortunately, Chadwick can’t be in Telluride this year, as he is on assignment in Poland. Nevertheless, we will show four of his 2010 pieces, all filmed by Ethan and Erin Boehme at last year’s Festival.

Amazing what wonders can lead from an unassuming hole in the ground: crystal spires, cathedrals of calcite, gypsum cascades. To access this magical cave, however, a certain suffering must be endured and one must overcome more than a little fear. For the cavers of Into Darkness, this means squeezing through impossibly constricted spaces, exhaling everything in their lungs to make their bodies improbably flat, feeling their heartbeats thud into intractable rock, or holding themselves up by nothing more than their armpits.

"Kadoma" was a nickname for Hendri Coetzee, a legendary South African kayaker who had explored some of Africa’s wildest rivers. In December of 2010, American pro kayakers Chris Korbulic and Ben Stookesbury followed Coetzee into the Democratic Republic of Congo for a first descent of the dangerous Lukuga River. Seven weeks into the expedition, tragedy struck. Coetzee was paddling tip to tail in between the other two men when a fifteen-foot crocodile surfaced silently and swiftly pulled him underwater. He was never seen again.

With this film, Life Cycles co-creators Derek Frankowski and Ryan Gibb have changed the visual aesthetic of mountain biking forever. 

Filmmaker Kenny Luby followed a day in the life of professional downhill skateboarder Eric Lundberg who has to transition from breakfast to trying not to lose it at 70 miles per hour. 

Mbambu is a sixteen-year-old girl who lives at the foot of the Rwenzori Mountains in Uganda. She is also an actress, an aspiring mountain guide and hopes to be the first in her family to complete secondary school. These are significant ambitions for anyone; in Uganda, they are nearly unheard of for a young girl. If Mbambu becomes a guide in the Rwenzoris—an impressive accomplishment in its own right because the mountains reach to nearly 17,000 feet–she would break all sorts of cultural and societal barriers for women in West Uganda.

Johnny Barnes is one of the happiest people in the world, and his main goal in life is to share that happiness. This humble and lovable Bermudan wakes up at 3 a.m. every morning and heads to one particularly busy intersection to stand, wave, blow kisses and shout, “I love you!” to passers-by. Crazy or not, Johnny has a lot to say about what it takes to be optimistic and happy. And he has brought smiles to the faces of thousands who would have an otherwise dreary morning commute.

The Goldman Environmental Prize is perhaps the most important—and generous—environmental tribute of its kind with an annual financial award that goes to grassroots environmental heroes from each of the world’s six inhabited continents. My Toxic Reality is about one of the winners, Hilton Kelly, who saw a need for someone to take a stand in his community of Port Arthur, Texas, a place where eight petrochemical refining facilities lord over that town’s residential areas.

In On Assigmnent: Jimmy Chin, Renan Ozturk (Mountainfilm 2009, Samsara, which won the Charlie Fowler Award) trains his lens on a man who usually stands behind a lens of his own. Climber, skier and mountaineer Jimmy Chin, a longtime guest of Mountainfilm, has spent his life behind the camera and from that viewpoint has chronicled incredible feats in some of the most breathtaking places in the world.

For 12 years, Judith Selby and Richard Lang have collected plastic trash along a one-kilometer stretch of beach near their home in Northern California. At a rate of 35 pounds per hour, it isn’t surprising that they have accumulated tons of debris. What may be surprising is the art they produce with it—sculptures and abstract prints reminiscent of Paul Klee and Henri Matisse that feature 1949-vintage toys, Korean lighters, Astroturf (a common find), bubble blowers and hair curlers that may have last adorned a human head thirty or forty years ago.

These days a river that flows freely from its headwaters to the sea is a rare creature. Of the few that do remain unchained, many are threatened by development or damming. Power in the Pristine, a short film created by Rios Libres, a group of adventurers who include professional climber and longtime Mountainfilm guest Timmy O’Neill and writer Craig Childs, is a portrait of one such river: the Baker in Chilean Patagonia.

Animation, as a medium and an art form, can be powerfully profound, especially when it delivers a universal message through an intensely personal story. Dustin Grella’s short film about September 11 achieves just such a synthesis. His sad story, sparely told, is perfectly complemented by the simple beauty of his drawings that are, at once, both ephemeral and unforgettable.

Winter. Brian Ward discovers an unexpected and new-found love for water in its frozen and expanded form.

“People keep looking at our shoes and boards in a weird way. They think that they are attached to the boards through some sort of magnetic field.” So says 17-year-old Afghani Murza, a young teenager from Kabul who has found his oasis in a place called Skateistan. Directed by former professional snowboarder Orlando von Einsiedel, the film Skateistan documents how a physical action as simple as skateboarding can help to dissolve barriers between boys and girls and empower children to believe in their ability to create positive change, even in a bomb-scarred country.

Filmmakers Trip Jennings & Andy Maser (Mountainfilm 2010, Flathead Wild and others) return to Mountainfilm with Spoil, a film in which they follow the International League of Conservation Photographers and the Gitga'at First Nation people of British Columbia in their search for the illusive spirit bear.

“The worst thing a man can do is live for nothing.” So says James Armstrong, a barber in Birmingham who was one of thousands of unknown and unsung heroes of the civil rights struggle of the '60s. Living by his own creed, Armstrong willingly risked his own life in the often-brutal fight for basic rights—to vote, hold a job, use a public facility or go to school without the oppression of racial segregation or fear of violence. In the decades since, he has kept the faith that enduring what he and his fellow foot soldiers called the “terrible days” would be worth it.

The Goldman Environmental Prize is perhaps the most important—and generous—environmental tribute of its kind with an annual financial award that goes to grassroots environmental heroes from each of the world’s six inhabited continents. In The Grid we meet one of the winners, Ursula Sladek of Germany, for whom the idea of 100-percent reliance on renewable energy by 2050 is not a hope or a dream, but simply a matter of time. Having led a successful 10-year effort to take over her regional power grid through a citizen’s collective, Sladek is accustomed to taking her time.

In an empty and dystopian war-torn world a new hope arrives in the form of a seed.

A warning to all ophidiophobes: close your eyes now! This short film–made from over 70,000 still images taken by Joel Sartore–has the slimy scary creatures in nearly every single frame.

Renan Ozturk (Mountainfilm 2009, Samsara, which won the Charlie Fowler Award) now heads to the remote and sun-flattened landscape of the Ennedi Desert in northeastern Chad. It’s a hot, sand-scoured and unfriendly place, but from its vast belly rise clusters of spires, towers and rock formations that are breathtakingly lovely.

Forty-eight minutes may seem awfully long for a film about a truck farm. After all, how much can a filmmaker say–that is interesting–about a truck that has been converted to grow plants in the back of it? This skepticism is warranted but unnecessary, as filmmakers Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis are top of their game (they are also starting the Food Corps and have another terrific film in the festival called The City Dark). They show us how to make a truck farm–drill holes in the bed, plant stuff, park on the streets of New York City and let it grow – who knew?

Most people come to New York City to see the sights, and understandably they look up. Steve Duncan, a historian and self-described urban explorer, looks down–way down–into the maze of tunnels that run beneath the city. Directed by Andrew Wonder, Undercity, is a short documentary that follows Duncan as he shows us some of the city’s secrets and introduces us to some of the peculiar characters that that lurk below the streets. Not content to explore underground, Duncan sets his sights on some hard-to-reach landmarks above–way above–ground.

Waiting for a Train is the lovely story of Japanese-born Toshio Hirano, who took the road less traveled by following a unique and encompassing passion for the music of Jimmie Rodgers. The moment he discovered Rodgers was a transcendent epiphany that inspired him to immigrate to the United States through Appalachia and Texas, after which he finally landed in San Francisco. As a man who is truly following his bliss, Hirano chases a passionate dream for over 40 years and is rewarded with a life well lived, one that is filled with music, song and dance.

With trial bike in hand, Danny MacAskill returns to the old country to try a few new school tricks. Filmmaker Dave Sowerby captured MacAskill at play in his hometown of Dunvegan, Scotland. 

The North Fork of the Payette has long been fabled as one of the classics of big water kayaking. WildWater—beautifully filmed by Anson Fogel (who also edited Chasing Water and Cold)—takes us along as kayakers attempt to run this classic during a record high water year. 

If you’re like me and think that bikes can save the world–or at least have a hugely positive impact–then this film is for you. With My Own Two Wheels tells the story of four people whose lives have been deeply changed by bikes. In Africa we meet a visiting nurse who sees infinitely more patients after he acquires a bike; we also meet a remarkable woman who overcomes serious physical handicaps to become the best bike mechanic in her town.

This short film’s full title is Yelp (With Apologies to Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”). Directed by Tiffany Shlain and narrated by Peter Coyote, it is a brief essay (really a rant) about technology and how we need to–as Peter Coyote shouts to the world–“unplug, unplug, unplug and revisit the present tense.”
–DH

Filmmaker Renan Ozturk (Towers of Ennedi and On Assignment) shows us a new angle on slack lining as Dean Potter attempts a perilous crossing at Upper Yosemite Falls.