Mountain
Film
Festival
review
By Jen Tombs
There are worlds between England's Lake District and the Rocky Mountains. Yet Kendal Mountain Festival has found itself in in Canmore's ArtsPlace, a very long way from home. I've made the same journey. So it is strange and a little poignant to watch presenters introduce the documentary collection from the damp, grey-washed land I fled.
Poignancy, in fact, is the thread running through the films chosen for the film festival's North American tour. Each movie gives voice to something that extreme and beautiful landscapes can give humans. A voice to the feeling you get looking at the Bow Valley's mountains at sunrise, as their unforgiving faces glow gold and the sky turns a hard blue. Or of summitting foggy Lake District peaks, looking down on grizzly crags and sparse, lonely hills dotted with sheep.
The Movies
The first film of the night, Flow, follows two brothers, Nathan and Ruben, and their love of mountain biking. Suitably flowing camerawork shows the duo weave their bikes effortlessly through Wales's sweeping green landscapes. The most engaging moments, though, come from their mother Ina, whose pride beams through the screen.
It's the next film, Bring The Salmon Home, which is the highlight of the festival collection. Each year, anti-dam activists from First Nations along the US's Klamath River run the same spectacular route that salmon take ― or should take. The fish's voyage is blocked by dams, and some years they have died en masse. The film's subjects are keenly engaged in a history that connects them to the land they are on; one organiser describes a feeling of "ancestors pushing us". Another runner describes "a sickness leaving the body". Beyond the fish's deaths a more catastrophic soul-death looms: a critical severing of people from planet, which the runners are helping to heal. Their efforts have now borne fruit; a dam removal program is under way.
If Bring The Salmon Home is a profound watch, the other standout is the most straight-forwardly thrilling. Changabang: Return To The Shining Mountain follows an Australian and New Zealander team's jaw-dropping Indian quest to climb Changabang's vertical west face ― a feat only done once, in 1976. The danger and adrenaline is palpable, and the trio's trip comes across most of all as an exercise in suffering. The men describe "living in a dream world" where nothing exists but pain and cold and the void below. When they make it to the peak, their understatement, summing it up as "a big fucking effort", is funny and touching.
A weak link is Like Mother Like Daughter, which suffers from being the second movie combining mountain biking and family bonding. There is something a little smug and self-celebratory, too, as British athlete Hannah reflects on a bike race across Tanzania and parenting her daughter. Nevertheless, the segments on Hannah's relationship with her own mother are moving, showing three generations brought together by love of adventure.
Soundscape is the most visually interesting offering, using animation at parts to demonstrate how Erik, who is blind, uses echolocation to climb the Incredible Hulk crag in California. Erik sometimes can't locate the best holds, but explains "if you wait until you can take a perfect step, you'll never take a step". At the top, his soundscape opens up: there is nothing for echoes to bounce back from. "It's like you've been swallowed by sky," he sums up. Soundscape does a beautiful, subversive job at exploring what goes into experiencing beauty and a sense of place.
The next movie is a similarly joyous celebration of hiking. I Am Because You Are follows a group of Canadian women of colour stepping together into a world that can seem very white and male. The multi-day hike in the Bugaboos, involving ice picks and scrambling, is a gnarly choice for a first mountaineering trip ― and first time camping for some. What resonates most, though, is not the sense of adversity but of comradeship, and delight in finding the challenge is not only do-able but wonderful. It's an ode to the power of invitation and of saying yes.
Unfortunately, the evening's last film is weaker. Going Home shows filmmaker Ashley learning to paraglide to honour her adventurous late uncle Clive. Sticking to the standard beats of an emotional journey documentary, it sometimes feels glib and manipulative. Ashley's quest is doubtless heartfelt, though, and the view below as she soars into the air above New Zealand is stunning.
“Mountains are bigger than metaphor.”
After The Movies
The event is one of brimming emotions and somber reflections on the land ― which seem especially important as Canmore's own mountains greet ArtsPlace's departing audience on all sides. Something about the documentary selection, though, grates a little. Why must mountains, as a subject, be mediated through adrenaline sports and personal journeys? Can we not see a mountain, see it distant and real and lasting longer than we will, without shaping into a tool for ourselves?
An undercurrent is always present in talk of conquering challenges, that of *beating* nature. Francis Bacon, who revolutionised Western scientific thought, wrote that science can "penetrate" the land, "conquer and subdue her". While Bacon wrote, Europe's witch trials were under way; women and land were both tamed to make way for an era of colonial conquest. Mountaineering perhaps chases the same goal, or involves the same staking of an ownership claim.
But not every film falls into this trap, and Bring The Salmon Home engages with the issue directly. The film's subjects are aware of the importance of undoing the damage wrought by colonial US efforts to subdue nature. The runners in the film don't run to give themselves a personal victory, but to stand in solidarity with the river and salmon they live alongside.
And in the end, perhaps humans' need to know nature is not born of desire to tame it, but to prove it is untameable ― to see ourselves dissolve in a mountain's scale and immortality. Mountains mould the shape of our planet and its horizon. The joy of being among them is the same joy as living on Earth, and perhaps the urge to climb one is the same urge that drove me to move my life across an ocean. But then again, not everything is about us. Mountains are bigger than metaphor.