October 2007

October 30, 2007

A few weeks ago I posted a blog about the future of film festivals. I’ve been visiting a lot of film festivals lately, though, and I do wonder if the market might be a bit over-saturated to sustain the number of festivals out there for the long term. I do still firmly believe there will be a place for festivals indefinitely into the future, but festival organizers can’t just sit back on their laurels and expect to keep attracting rapt, sold-out audiences from year to year.

Content on demand is the nemesis of any pre-programmed entertainment, and in the next few years we’re going to see a huge increase in the immediate availability of all sorts of video content through the web. YouTube is the obvious example for the masses, but streaming video content on the web is already getting more saavy. Take Joost, for example. Joost bills itself as “free online tv” and already has 15,000 shows available on demand. They are already partnering with CBS, the WB, and VH1, among others. Why would you ever leave your house?

I’ve had a hard enough time tearing myself away from short, amateur, 5-minute videos on YouTube. Here’s my recent favorite:

This clip would never work in a film festival. Or would it?

What do we need to focus on as a film festival, to keep audiences coming to theaters? What is unique about a festival? Can we peacefully coexist with internet tv and video content on demand?

Posted by Emily Long

October 23, 2007

It’s a beautiful, sunny Tuesday and I’m about to head to the Scottish countryside. I’m on vacation across the pond, but I wanted to blog briefly because I’ve spent the weekend attending the Edinburgh Mountain Film Festival, a very well-planned and executed event that reminds me of what Mountainfilm in Telluride must have been like in its first ten years.

Stevie Christie, who runs the festival as a hobby and out of sheer love of the genre, was a friendly host and offered tickets for the weekend. The festival schedule is simple and tightly programmed: six sessions of about two hours of films and lectures, spaced over a three-day weekend, in one dedicated theater.

They played a few films that Mountainfilm has screened in the past (Xtreme Tramping, Big-Summit Speed Riding, Flying High from the New World Disorder series, the Didier section of First Ascent) and had a strong showing of Scottish subjects and filmmakers.

The choices for finalist for best film were a bit odd, in my opinion. Asiemut, one of the best films running the mountain film festival circuit this year, was screened but not nominated, and a strange and unsuccessful Swiss mish-mash (parody?) film of bad guys shooting at paragliding skiers (for twenty minutes), called Woopy, was. The film that won was mostly deserving, I guess, but maybe I’ve seen just a few too many solo-adventure-journey-into-the-wilderness films to get really excited about this one, called Scottish Extremities, the story of one man’s kayak journey through the Hebrides.

I still haven’t had a chance to see the full version of the new film from Hot Aches (the guys who won the Charlie Fowler award at MF last year), but EMFF did play a custom-edit of Committed featuring mostly the Scottish climbs. Trad climbing? In my opinion, these guys are completely crazy. The tension is pretty extreme when you’ve got a climber on screen saying “well, I could die if I fall off this…”

Posted by Emily Long

Mountainfilm in Telluride now accepting submissions for 30th annual festival. Submit early, submit often!

October 16, 2007

It’s Call 4 Entries season once again at Mountainfilm, which brings up the question that I hear from filmmakers all through the winter: “what in the world is a “mountain film?” I just got a phone call this morning from a filmmaker whose film documents a beauty pageant for HIV+ women in Africa. Is that a mountain film?

The films we accept for Mountainfilm run the gamut of topics, so sometimes it’s a bit of a challenge to describe the ubiquitous Mountainfilm selection. We try to advertise our call for entries succinctly but smartly, with a listing of our typical genres and some additional information. Here’s the text from our Call 4 Entries card:

Greetings from Telluride, Colorado—the small-town headquarters of America’s premier festival of mountain, adventure, cultural and environmental film and video, now in its 30th year.

Mountainfilm celebrates indomitable spirit, poignantly expressed through film screenings, presentations, exhibits and conversations. Submit your “labor of love” and you may find yourself amongst maestros in the fields of filmmaking, exploration, science, adventure, cultural preservation and environmental solution.

That actually sums it up pretty well. But there’s still a lot of grey area. Some mountain film festivals exclusively screen films in the genre of mountain film, but OUR programming goes way beyond mountaineering and exploration. In some ways “Mountainfilm” is a misnomer, because the pure description is far too limiting for our content. But we couldn’t call ourselves a wildlife or environmental film festival, either, because we have films that have nothing to do with the environment. What about saying we are simply a documentary film festival? That wouldn’t be accurate, either. Take The Cave of the Yellow Dog, which we screened in 2006. It is a feature length narrative film from Mongolia.

Our history began with pure mountain film, and the name “Mountainfilm” has now come to encompass everything that we represent. For example, would we screen a documentary about the first ever transgendered production of The Vagina Monologues? We did, a film called Beautiful Women. How about a satire mockumentary attacking the conspicuous consumption and under-population of resort towns? The Lost People of Mountain Village. An unsolved murder mystery from the 1917 wild west Montana? An Injury to One, in 2004.

We hate to limit our potential entries by putting restrictions on submissions, because a film that at first appears to be outside of our typical genres may work perfectly in a program block. So we say we accept films on any subject, from any country, in an genre, produced any year, either narrative or documentary, short or long. But there is an essential Mountainfilm-ness that we are looking for, and that’s where our motto and mission come in. “Celebrating Indomitable Spirit” is most likely the fewest words possible to describe the essence of Mountainfilm, and if you want just a few more words then here you go:

Mountainfilm is dedicated to educating and inspiring audiences about issues that matter, culture worth exploring, environments worth preserving and conversations worth sustaining.

So the answer to the question above—is the Miss HIV pageant a mountain film?—is a resounding yes.

Posted by Emily Long

Mountainfilm will be accepting entries for our 30th annual festival, held May 23-26, 2008, through the end of February. If you are interested in submitting a film, please click here.

October 9, 2007

Justin and I have just returned from a short trip to Taos to attend the 7th annual Taos Mountain Film Festival. We were there to meet and greet both new and old friends, and to source potential movies for our next festival in May.

The Taos Plaza. Note the prayer flags hanging above the venue, a ubiquitous sign of a mountain film festival. —Photo by Dave Brown

Taos is not far from Telluride, so we had a beautiful 6-hour drive through the shimmering fall colors of southwestern Colorado and northern New Mexico to get there on Friday. We arrived mid-afternoon and the weather was gorgeous—70 and sunny with a cool autumn breeze—exactly the sort of weather you don’t want for a film festival!

But we persevered, and shored ourselves up in dark theaters for two days of hardcore movie watching.

Taos is also known for its parties, though, and events are planned at least twice a day during the festival. I was sincerely stoked to meet Katie Lee at Eske’s Pub on Friday night (over pints of microbrew and bowls of New Mexican green chili), and then to get a chance to see her film on the Glen Canyon the next morning.

I was born after Glen Canyon had already been flooded by the Powell Reservoir, but seeing Katie Lee’s photographs of the endlessly intricate side canyons of this beautiful landscape brought tears to my eyes. She’s right, we need to keep special places like this wild, and if it means we need to stop “effing” having kids, then that’s the price we should pay. Check out the web site for the Glen Canyon Institute for more info.

Up Dungeon Canyon, 1963. A side canyon of the Glen Canyon, now flooded under “Lake” Powell (the Powell Reservoir). —Photo by Robert H Moench

I was equally stoked on Saturday night to meet the kayaker Seth Warren, who, with Tyler Bradt, has just finished an epic expedition from the northernmost point of Alaska to the southernmost tip of South America, in a modified fire truck fueled completely by biodiesels like fish oil, french fry grease, pig oil, and palm oil (this last one does not come highly recommended). Oil & Water is the name of their expedition and also the name of the 30-minute teaser film that Taos screened this weekend. Seth & Tyler will have a feature length version of the film out by the winter. Hmmmm…

“Baby,” a fire engine fueled exclusively by grease. —From the Oil & Water Project

Fall is high season for the mountain film world. Taos, one of two American festival to be invited to be member of the International Alliance for Mountain Film (the other is yours truly, Mountainfilm in Telluride), is the first of a series of mountain festival cousins, most of them abroad. Mountainfilm staff will be attending at least three more in the coming months: Edinburgh (in Scotland), Banff (in Canada) and Kendall (in England), but we’ll be missing Graz (Germany), Dundee (England), Autrans (France), Torello (Spain), and Kragnogorski (Russia). The ‘net makes it possible to seek out award-winning films from all these festivals, but there’s no substitution for meeting filmmakers in person.

I’ll be out of the office for the next few weeks, visiting festivals and taking a vacation, but we’ll make sure to keep the blog posts coming every Tuesday!

Posted by Emily Long

Imagine the power of film…

October 2, 2007

More than a hundred years ago, visionary scientists and engineers like Thomas Edison were inventing devices that did something extraordinary: they projected moving pictures onto a screen.

Nowadays, we mostly take movies for granted. But imagine the impact that this new technology must have had a hundred years ago, in a time when people traveled by horse and buggy (or more often on foot), the moon was made of cheese, and images had to be meticulously painted to render an indelible picture. Film must have been considered something magical, and moving images on screen an impossible wonder.

However, when film was still being born, it was already seen by some as a parlor trick, a mere vaudeville show act. Two of the earliest inventors of film technologies, brothers Auguste and Louis Lumiere, declared that “the cinema is an invention without any future.”

Sometimes, as we search Wikipedia for obscure information about early film pioneers, video conference with someone in Scotland, sit in a dark theater watching a documentary film from India, or slack on the job by watching YouTube clips about Charlie the Unicorn, we forget that information used to flow at a much slower pace.

The inevitable and exponential movement of technology into the future is highlighted in a YouTube video of a powerpoint presentation, called “Did You Know,” by Karl Fisch, a teacher in Littlefield, Colorado. Fisch had no idea that his presentation, which was created for a teacher training seminar, would get nearly 2 million hits in the months following its posting. “Did You Know” (see the updated version here) offers some phenomenal statistics about the pace of our current technological activity (for example: the number of text messages sent today alone exceeds the entire population of the planet).

THE FUTURE OF FILM FESTIVALS
The Lumiere brothers might have been the first people to poo-poo the importance of film, but they certainly weren’t the last. As medias shift to encompass new technologies, someone out there is habitually claiming the death of the older form. Film to TV, TV to video, video to streaming online on-demand content…there is always a new vehicle for “movies” to be delivered to hungry watching eyes. But what stays consistent throughout this process is the incredible power of the moving image itself, regardless of format, to educate and inspire audiences.

As a film festival in general, and specifically as a festival that prides itself on its ability to give rise to a domino effect that does actively change the world in positive ways, we at Mountainfilm are constantly thinking about the impact the films we chose have on our audience.

The credits roll, the lights go up, but the experience isn’t over. Regardless of whatever media people chose to use the most to watch moving pictures—be it Tivo, YouTube, podcasts, or some crazy new technology that hasn’t even been invented yet—film festivals will always offer the special and priceless moments after a film screening where the audience comes face-to-face with the actual people they just saw up on screen. At a festival, the audience is given the opportunity to ask questions and engage with the film subjects and filmmakers in ways that significantly deepen the experience of watching a film.

A panel of experts at Mountainfilm’s Moving Mountains Symposium on Energy in 2007

Mountainfilm is turning 30 this year—we’ve been around for a quarter of the complete life of moving pictures—and we are both proud to look back on our history and excited for the future.

Posted by Emily Long