Banff Mountain Film Festival

Friday evening two weeks ago (that's how long it's taken me to finish this post...), I went to the Banff Mountain Film Festival, hosted by REI at the Los Altos High School Eagle Theater, with Trang. It was three hours worth of outdoor-activity films, as well as an intermission and raffle, for the purpose of fundraising for the Snowlands Network. The films shown were:

1. Entropy - 11 minutes of snowkiting footage. Snowkiting is snowboarding while being pulled by a kite across relatively flat snow plains. The snowkiters did lots of jumps and spins in the air. Looked pretty neat, but there probably aren't too many places you can find the right conditions for doing this! This particular film was shot in Norway.
2. Badgered - A cute animated short about a hibernating badger whose slumber is disturbed by a pair of raucous crows. In the end, the crows were silenced when all their feathers were stripped by means of a weapon of mass destruction going off. I think there was supposed to be some sort of environmental message, but it eluded me.
   
3. King Lines - This was the feature film for the night, and follows Chris Sharma on his various climbing adventures around the world. It mostly focused on his deep water solo project "Es Pontas" in Mallorca, Spain. Climbing is spelled "Chris Sharma", and though I recently saw this film, I loved seeing Chris Sharma in all of his glory on a big screen. My hands were sweating the entire time!
4. The Western Lands - Hoy - Mainly the reading of a poem accompanied by stylistic footage. It was about an old man attempting a climb on his birthday. I admit I may have started dozing off during this one...
   
5. It's Fantastic - Kayakers don't seem to have much else to do besides attempt to descend waterfalls without flipping over.
   
6. Speedriding - Para-gliding with skis?
   
7. Cross Country with The Snakes - Random band members go cross-country skiing.
   
8. Inner Balance - Uni-cyclers doing tricks.

Okay, so I lost interest commentating on the last four movies. All in all, I was pretty entertained, though I was somewhat dismayed to realize that not a single movie featured women. I think King Lines showed some clips of girls climbing (a grand total of maybe 20 seconds of footage?), but that's about it. I'm not sure what to make of that. I suppose women are probably majorly underrepresented in "extreme" outdoor sports, so perhaps I shouldn't be surprised.

I was also severely disappointed that two Lindas won raffle items, neither of them me.