Fresh Focus: Behind the Scenes at the Mountain Film Festivals
By Marc PeruzziI thought I’d start a film festival. But most of the good themes are taken. Telluride has Mountainfilm, Salt lake claimed X-Dance, Whistler offers the 72-hour Filmmaker Showdown, Nevada City has the Wild and Scenic angle covered, Fort Collins is home to the Backcountry Film Festival and even little Carbondale recently started a climbing film festival called 5-Point.
So I’m thinking MountainPorn. Chicks with mustaches. Greasy Carhartts. Sleeping bags. The sexual tension that comes with pulling someone’s car from a ditch. (You’ve felt it.) Lots of wood-splitting imagery. Remind people that mountain folk get it on. Give it to us, woodsy. I’ll set up shop in a festival-deprived town like Gunnison. Whoops, Crested Butte has Reel Fest. Maybe Ogden. Fill up some local hotels. Charge the filmmakers $50 to enter, get some popcorn machines and I’m in business.
“If you’re getting into the festival business to make money, that’s a bad idea.”
Why not? It seems as if every mountain town suddenly needs to host a film festival. From The Meeting in Aspen (snow sports) to The Beating in Silverton (low budget snow sports), there are more than a dozen festivals in Colorado alone. That list includes Telluride’s storied Mountainfilm festival, which was started 30 years ago by a bunch of climbing bums, but doesn’t include the many stops of the traveling road show that is the Banff Mountain Film tour. Just read your local paper and you’ll see a slew of new festivals with only vaguely different mission statements and subject matters.
Film fests are increasingly popular internationally, but in the U.S. it’s the Mountain West that’s gone festival crazy. Pity North Dakota with its one film fest in Fargo. So are mountain-town festival organizers getting rich by means of some massive new mud-season revenue generator? Not by a long shot.
Here’s how it works in a digestible form (with all due respect to the festival directors who know it ain’t this easy): First the organizers design a logo and ornament it in Cannes-style palms that look like something you’d want on your DVD case, then they launch a website and call for submissions. The entries pour in, anywhere from 50 in the case of a niche event to thousands for a mainstream independent film festival. As a baseline, Mountainfilm in Telluride, one of the bigger mountain-town festivals, routinely sees 500 entries. Naturally somebody has to watch all those films to decide which ones merit screening, so the organizers charge $50 entry fees.
But even with the fees, you’re still losing a lot of money on that model, so now it’s time to go out and secure some title sponsors. If you can sign up a couple The North Face, Patagonia, Coke and Whole Foods types, you’ll be able to take the next step, which is to market your event in like-minded magazines and local papers. Your town’s chamber of commerce — always looking to increase foot traffic in the shoulder seasons — will be happy to help as long as it doesn’t cost them anything. Secure some art house theaters and abandoned auditoriums and you’re in business.
Sort of. Kind of. Not really. See, most film fests are run as barely break-even non-profits driven by genuine altruistic intents. “If you’re getting into the festival business to make money,” says Brian Wimmer, director and founder of the action sports film festival X-Dance, “that’s a bad idea.”
It’s better to just believe in what you’re doing. David Holbrooke, the festival director of Mountainfilm in Telluride, is unapologetic that their event is in existence to do more than just show hardcore adventure films. “At the other festivals you need to be wearing a harness or have climbing skins in your pack to fit in,” he says. “We’re almost surely the only festival that would have Glen Plake and Christian Amanpour as guest speakers. Mountainfilm is about expanding the audience’s worldview. It’s mountains as a metaphor.”
Through the films they screen and the speakers they invite, Mountainfilm tackles such tough universal issues as water, energy, biodiversity, climate and modern slavery. “The Bush Administration has given me an activist imperative approach,” says Holbrooke. But Mountainfilm isn’t all earnest, Holbrooke takes great care to get the balance right, screening classic adventure films along with the heavier stuff and finding films that bridge the gap between humanism and adventure. “Like Shawn White skateboarding in Rwanda,” he says.
Mountainfilm morphed from a pure climbing film festival into something more when its founders realized there was only so much you could do with climbing as a genre and that great trips don’t necessarily make for great films. The Wild and Scenic festival out of Nevada City, however, began as a festival with a cause. The event was founded by the South Yuba River Citizens League with the built-in mission of using the power of film to inspire activism. Which sounds painfully boring, but the three-day event, which includes speakers and gallery walks, routinely sells 4,500 tickets, 35 percent of which are purchased from out-of-towners. With 250 films submitted each year and 125 screened, it’s now the largest environmental film festival in the country, complete with a 20-stop road show that lets local environmental groups promote the films, take center stage and actively sign up new members.
As with Telluride, the festival has grown beyond its original mandate — rivers — and now embraces all environmental causes. But it wouldn’t work if the films weren’t compelling. Some of the films screened this year like Bugs of the Underworld (aquatic insects) and Organism (a flock of starlings in flight so synchronized that they look like one massive organism), are simple in that they only attempt to capture nature through cinematography and go easy on the overt messaging. Other films, such as Sharks: Stewards of the Reef are brutally honest reports that reveal the impact of finning — the killing of sharks for their fins and usually not their meat to supply Asian markets. Other films, like Guardians of the Selva Maya and Fish and Cow highlight smart stewardship and tend to not leave you feeling like you were gut punched in your sleep.
Some of Wild and Scenic’s films are produced by professional filmmakers, others by grassroots activists, but it’s the type of moving documentary work that either makes people open wallets or ditch careers and become activists. Which is exactly what Wild and Scenic’s Susie Sutphin did. “I learned about the film festival while working at Patagonia. I found myself getting more and more excited about the potential, so I quit my job and became the tour manager.”
Hmm. All this altruism is making my plans for a Mountain Porn festival seem kind of shallow and self-serving. Wait a second. I am shallow and self-serving. Isn’t there a place for some levity in the film festival world? Does everything have to mean something?
Some of my favorite short films have come out of Whistler’s Telus World Ski & Snowboard Festival 72-Hour Filmmaker Showdown, which since 2002 has unleashed filmmakers on Whistler for, uh, 72 hours of production before the finished products get shown to a live audience and are judged by critics and cinematographers. Working in such time restraints, it’s hard to take yourself too seriously, so the films usually devolve (or evolve) to slapstick humor. In one of the best (my read), entitled Everyday Extreme, a young Whistler bro in a knit cap applies the extreme zeitgeist to everyday life. One scene has him progressively moving farther and farther away from the urinal, in the next he waits till the bus driver starts closing the doors before launching himself onto the bus. In another short, employing spot-on nature-film clichés, the filmmaker chronicles a Whistler cougar attack from the stalking phase at the bar to the final kill. It ends with the satiated cougar smug and resplendent — in high heels and an animal print coat.
This year’s Showdown winner was a film dubbed The Legend of Jacque Le’Nar. In a mock historical recreation piece, the filmmakers bring us back to the late 1700s and the invention of the body-hugging Spandex speed-skiing suit. All the dialogue is done in trapper-French with English subtitles. By itself , it’s perfect YouTube fodder in the spirit of a Saturday Night Live short, but the collected works are a big enough draw to entice 2,500 viewers to shell out $15 to attend the show. Last year, 78 teams preregistered and 58 teams finished the challenge. One of the films went on to get accepted into Banff’s short film category. “The film business in Canada is taking off,” says Lilli Clark, the multi-media events producer for WSSF. “We’re trying to launch careers and develop Canadian artists. We’re competing with the Americans. Canada is standing up and saying we can make great films.”
“It’s this type of honest film work that you just don’t get on FOX.”
Ahh, Canadian insecurity. No need, no need. The Banff Festival of Mountain Films has fairly well ruled the mountain category for 32 years. Like Telluride, they’ve grown beyond their original purview both in content and venues. Their tour now delivers 500 shows to 200,000 viewers in 30 countries and makes enough money to pay its filmmakers modest royalties based on how many times they screen their work. “Modest” is the key word. Nobody’s getting rich. The Banff Centre and the tour are also nonprofits. “If someone makes a million-dollar film, they won’t recoup their investment,” says Banff World Tour Manager Jim Baker. “But we have a film we toured this year that a guy made by selling his old cross-country skis. He’ll do alright.”
As a part-time graduate student and full-time ski tech in Missoula, the Banff event and its accompanying tour was the first film festival I knew of. It certainly was the first time I’d heard the term “mountain film.” Once a year, the local outdoor shop would sponsor a screening and for a few hours a crowd of skiers, climbers and kayakers would watch Americans paddling in New Zealand, Italians climbing in Patagonia and Frenchmen skiing in Alaska. The films were short and diverse enough that you never got burned out by too much action. And the tour organizers wisely broke up the sports with environmental films and short humor hits.
Sometimes the humor and the environment even overlapped, like in one memorable film about mountain gorillas. I’d seen plenty of gorilla documentaries, but I’d never known how heavily censored they’d been. This was gorillas uncut. At one point a huge silverback reached a massive digit into his nose and retrieved a neon green snot the size of a night crawler. He ate it, as he also ate his own feces a little later on in the show. It’s this type of honest film work that you just don’t get on FOX.
Ultimately that’s part of the reason why film festivals in mountain towns have so much appeal. You can’t watch this type of stuff anywhere else. Adventure and adventure sports films are especially hard to find. ESPN covers the X-Games, but frankly they aren’t as fun to watch as an uninhibited gorilla. I’ll admit it. I like expedition films. I even like pure ski, mountain bike and boating films with no storyline — as long as they’re short enough. Sometimes I just want to zone out and watch some sick footy like I did in my shop rat days. But that’s just not sustainable for an entire festival unless High Times and Avery’s Brewing are title sponsors.
X-Dance was started eight years ago in Utah because its founder, Brian Wimmer had grown up around the Sundance Festival and thought that action sports deserved their own event. He thought that action sports filmmakers would benefit from rubbing elbows with the indie film set. The goal was to see all the jaw-dropping athleticism get an infusion of documentary storytelling. He set up X-Dance to both support and drive the filmmakers. “We’re like the Academy Awards of action sports,” says Wimmer. “We’re judging films on cinematography, editing, story, music and action. So if you’re heavy on action and there’s no story, you better kill it with cinematography. The film that ends up winning the festival does all those things well.”
The quality of the 200 entries he sees each year has increased dramatically, says Wimmer. “It’s become an international festival. A lot of these people are premier filmmakers. We have some winners who’ve done it with no money at all, and people who spend a million dollars. Part of that has to do with the availability of technology. The good news is it’s easier for filmmakers to make films with the tech, the bad news is that it’s easier for anyone to make films. We had all sorts of shit dumped on us for awhile.”
Because X-dance runs simultaneously with Sundance, Wimmer’s festival has become an important venue for filmmakers because of the chance that a distributor might see their work. This year’s best film winner, 199 Lives, and best documentary winner, Braboys, both earned theatrical distribution in exactly this way.
Wimmer and every organizer I talked with said they were in the festival business in large part to help cinematographers. “Making a film is a dark business,” says Telluride’s Holbrooke. “This helps them feel like that they’re not working in a vacuum.” That type of support is clearly appreciated by the filmmakers, but with the rapid growth of festivals many are now forced to pick and choose which ones they enter. “There’s an intrinsic element of going to festivals that I enjoy,” says Michael Brown, president of Serac Films. “You make a film and 5,000 people see it and then they come up and ask questions afterward. But at the same time you’re taking your film to 200 festivals, then the costs of just going — Taos, 5-Point or some a little farther away like Montreal, or the Wild and Scenic Film Festival — means you’re spending a lot of money just chasing the festivals. But if you want the world to know you’re good at what you do, then you want the festivals to know you exist.”
Will the festival trend continue? I hope so. For those of us who don’t own second homes in Tribeca or Cannes, having a film festival (or three) within driving distance is tough to beat. Let’s just make sure they don’t get too big. I happened to time a recent trip to Utah during the heart of the Sundance Festival. This was unfortunate. Park City was locked down and the town was full of celebrity gawkers. Thankfully the only celeb I recognized was former U.S. Ski Teamer Alex Shaffer. The hotels and restaurants were booked, while the ski areas were strangely devoid of skiers — this despite the fact that most of the rooms come with lift tickets. I’ve never been to Hollywood, but I sure would hate to see Hollywood come to the mountains any more than once a year in January.
Until MountainPorn takes off, that is.
