Media Release
For immediate
release
November 29, 2005
2005 / 2006 Banff Mountain Film Festival World Tour
hits the road
As soon as the 2005 Banff Mountain Film Festival ended in early November, audiences began packing into theatres to catch the Banff Mountain Film Festival World Tour. The tour brings films from the 30th annual festival to outdoor and film enthusiasts in 250 locations around the world.
Local tour hosts choose their programs from a menu of festival award-winners and audience favourites. This year’s selection features films such as:
Grand Prize winner Sur le
fil des 4000, a spectacularly filmed story of accomplishment, exhilaration, life, and death in the Alps — it follows the 2004 attempt by French alpinists Patrick Berhault and Phillippe Magnin to climb every peak in the Alps above 4000 metres in 82 days.
Excerpts from Peter Mortimer’s Return2Sender, produced and hosted by climbing star Timmy O’Neill — it’s an often-hilarious look at crack-climbing from every conceivable angle. One of the sections, Parallellojams, won the Alpine Club of Canada Award for Best Film on Climbing.
Off Road to Athens follows a group of U.S. Olympic mountain biking team hopefuls, as they make their way from competition to competition, a dramatic timeline of the high-stakes, high-stress world of professional mountain biking.
Films on the tour include original and experimental shorts, such as the minimalist film Balancing Point; high-adrenaline hurtles down big mountains, whitewater runs, and mountain biking trails; and eye-opening documentaries including the beautifully shot The Magic Mountain, which takes viewers into the remote region of Ladakh, in northern India.
The 2005 /2006 World Tour will reach more than 160,000 people in about 25 countries, including Iceland, Ecuador, India, Brazil, and the Czech Republic. Many of the tour screenings have become hotly anticipated events that function as local fundraisers for outdoors groups and environmental organizations.
The Banff Mountain Film Festival is an annual international competition featuring the world’s best films on mountain subjects. In 2005, the festival received more than 300 entries from 37 countries. The film festival is organized by Mountain Culture at The Banff Centre in Banff, Canada.
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Complete list of Tour locations and dates
High resolution, downloadable photos of select tour films are available on request.
Media Contact
Jill Sawyer
Media and Communications Officer, The Banff Centre
403.762.6475
