Every Memorial Day weekend for the past 40 years, the has taken over the town鈥檚 main strip. It鈥檚 a four-day mashup of conservation, action sports, and social justice films with a side of smart people, parties, and prescreening trail runs. In other words, all of our favorite things. This year鈥檚 theme is migration, so the films touch on how people, animals, and ideas move and change鈥攂y force or by choice. Here are the ones we鈥檙e most excited to see.
The Moment
In the late 1990s, while other mountain bikers were racing around in spandex, British Columbia became the heart of the nascent, weird, and sketchy freeride mountain biking. weaves together old footage of first cliff drops with current-day clips of those riders acknowledging how much they unwittingly shaped the sport into what it is today. 鈥淭here was blood. So much blood,鈥 journalist Mitchell Scott says in the film. Director Darcy Hennessey Turenne, a former pro mountain biker, was a preteen racing a hardware-store bike on Vancouver Island when riders like Brett Tippie were starting to send big jumps and build trails. Her love of the culture and subtle humor shine through, and the film has gotten high marks from the folks who pick them. 鈥The Moment offers a banquet of moments from those early, heady, bone-breaky days,鈥 former festival director Peter Kenworthy says.
Anote鈥檚 Ark
What happens when your country is swallowed by the sea? That鈥檚 the question Anote Tong, president of Kiribati, is facing as the ocean subsumes the Pacific island, which is by the middle of this century. toggles between everyday life on the island and Tong鈥檚 efforts to explain the crisis to the outside world. If it鈥檚 a foregone conclusion that the country will be one of the first places lost to climate change, the most interesting question that director and anthropologist Matthieu Rytz asks is how people like Tong think outside themselves and try to prevent other places from facing the same fate.
The Dawn Wall
In 2015, Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgenson鈥檚 first free ascent of Yosemite鈥檚 Dawn Wall put a national spotlight on big-wall climbing. But the backstory is much more complicated than the quest for a historic ascent, which had more hard pitches than any other previously sent big-wall free climb. dives into Caldwell鈥檚 complicated history, including his kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan and his relationship with Beth Rodden (the two married in 2003 and divorced in 2009), why the Dawn Wall became his way of working out the anxiety that came from those experiences, and how his obsession shaped the climb. The film was shot and directed by the Lowell Brothers and Peter Mortimer, who are behind some of the best recent climbing films, like Valley Uprising and King Lines, so both the story and visuals are great.
Return to Mount Kennedy
Jim Whittaker, the first American to summit Everest, named his son after one of his best friends: Bobby Kennedy. In 1965, the two were the first people to summit Mount Kennedy, a remote Yukon peak named in honor of JFK after his death. Fifty years later, their sons (Bob and Leif Whittaker and Chris Kennedy) went back to the mountain to try to climb it and see what bonded their fathers together. Mountainfilm is the world premiere of , which has an original score by Eddie Vedder.
Afghan Cycles
https://player.vimeo.com/video/137796562
We鈥檝e written in depth about and director Sarah Menzies鈥 quest to tell the story of the Afghan women鈥檚 cycling team. She鈥檚 followed the team as they鈥檝e fought to be able to ride and compete in a country where women鈥檚 freedom is fraught, and she鈥檚 captured both their bravery and the backlash to their actions. Five years in the making, her vision is now a reality:聽Mountainfilm is the movie鈥檚 U.S. premiere, and we鈥檙e excited to finally see Menzies鈥 deep dive into women鈥檚 liberation through cycling in the face of Taliban control.