You know what you’re getting when you buy a ticket to the Banff Mountain Film Festival. It’s a reliably dizzying hit of alpine heroics, deep powder, and people making deeply questionable life choices. This year’s Red Programme, however, appears to be the stronger of the two currently on tour, spanning the chaotic joy of sharing the outdoors with your kids to the surprisingly joyful, if somewhat masochistic, demands of extreme ascent. There’s as much humanity to enjoy in this programme as there is limb-risking adventure, and it’s all the stronger for it.
Holger Josef Walter Wimmer’s Emil & Karl: Little Wheels, Big Mountains takes the top spot in this collection without breaking a sweat. It ditches the adrenaline-spiking stunts entirely, tracking an adorable, entirely relatable bike trip shared by two fathers—Jakob Breitwieser and Konstantin Kappe—and their two-and-a-half-year-old sons.
There’s a rich seam of natural comedy here. Watching grown men actively question their life choices while towing toddlers up a 180-kilometre, 6,000-metre climbing loop in the gorgeous Swiss Alps is a joy.
Holger Josef Walter Wimmer’s Emil & Karl: Little Wheels, Big Mountains takes the top spot in this collection without breaking a sweat. It ditches the adrenaline-spiking stunts entirely, tracking an adorable, entirely relatable bike trip…
They are entirely at the mercy of afternoon nap schedules and urgent demands for croissants. Not a lot happens, yet the 22 minutes are absolutely crammed with humanity. By the time one of the kids starts adopting rocks along the route, you may begin to wonder whether Wes Anderson had a hand in this one.
Director Josh Lowell’s Reel Rock: Riders on the Storm pivots back to traditional extreme sports—a 1,300-metre big wall climb on the East Face of Patagonia’s Torre Central—and nails the adventure travelogue brief perfectly. Lowell gives his subjects room to breathe. The three Belgian climbers—Siebe Vanhee, Sean Villanueva O’Driscoll, and Nico Favresse—are massive, memorable personalities who charm you from the jump. The pacing is bang on.
They take the narrative lead with hilarious, insightful consequences. Popping corn in a portaledge thousands of feet above the deck is quite a flex, but the film’s real strength is its honest look at the brotherly, enabling love that keeps them clinging to a wall for 18 storm-battered days.
Then there is Finn Melanson’s The Finisher: Jasmin Paris & The Barkley Marathons. It’s a fascinating, tense introduction to a cryptic 100-mile race and an organiser, Gary “Lazarus Lake” Cantrell, who feels ripped from a gothic novel. It absolutely delivers on the ‘will-she-won’t-she’ tension. Yet, it forces a rather uncomfortable reckoning with extreme endurance culture. The sheer self-punishment on display feels distinctly bleak.
The three Belgian climbers—Siebe Vanhee, Sean Villanueva O’Driscoll, and Nico Favresse—are massive, memorable personalities who charm you from the jump. The pacing is bang on.
(A polite warning: skip the rest of this paragraph if you want to keep the climax a surprise). The closing footage is genuinely uncomfortable viewing. As Paris crosses the finish line with seconds to spare and collapses, the gathered spectators simply stand and gape at her for long, agonising seconds. Nobody steps forward with medical or even basic human assistance. You have to ask if this is a sporting culture we actually need to promote.
The rest of the billing doesn’t quite hit the same heights. David Arnaud’s Gabon Uncharted makes the bizarre choice to employ a third-party narrator rather than letting the SEND Collective—Adrian Mattern, Dane Jackson, Kalob Grady, and the late Bren Orton—voice their own 145-kilometre descent of the Ivindo River. It holds the audience firmly at arm’s length. The footage proves it was a crazy adventure undertaken by interesting people, which makes it a pity we never get to know them. Valentin Birant’s Mandala, meanwhile, is beautifully produced, highlighting French rider Kilian Bron’s love for the indigenous cultures of Nepal’s Dolpo region. It offers plenty of high pedal-power aesthetics, though you suspect the inevitable “making-of” documentary would be a punchier watch.
Overall, the Red Programme offers a smorgasbord
of philosophies. The relentless masochism of the Barkley Marathons might leave a slightly bitter taste. Still, the surprising joy found on the walls of Patagonia and a family bike trip through the Swiss Alps make this an undeniably great collection. If you have a hunger for more Banff goodness after all this, you can check out my Red review here.)
Featured Image: Mandala (Tour Edit) – Screenshot
By
By
