MOUNTAIN FILM
Mountainfilm travels year-round and worldwide with a selection of current and best-loved short films from the annual Mountainfilm festival in Telluride, Colorado. One word sets Mountainfilm apart – HEART. These films feature a mix of adventure, environment and celebration of the human spirit.
PLAYLIST
2018 USA / Duration: 4 mins
Directed by: Pablo Durana
Colorado Premiere
Ricky Jones lives in a van with his wife, spends his days roaming the woods and makes a living making a difference — collecting genetic data of big-leafed maples as part of an effort to cut down on illegal logging. “Why wouldn’t you want to do your part to give back to the community?” he asks. “And the community being the entire world.”
2018 USA / Duration: 6 mins
Directed by: Jess Colquhoun
“I didn’t think I had a future,” Will Robinson says of coming home from Iraq with PTSD and injuries. For 12 years, he endured the dead ends of medication-and-alcohol abuse and ineffective therapy. Then inspiration struck. He tackled the Pacific Crest Trail, then the Appalachian Trail, walking 3,800 miles on his own path to recovery. “Hiking gave me the ability to be the person that I always was, the confident person who was capable of doing anything,” says Robinson, whose trail name is Akuna. He’s already eyeing his next objective: The Continental Divide Trail.
2018 USA / Duration: 4 mins
Directed by: Scott Gaffney
Tune in for a tutorial on how to absolutely shred Alaskan spines.
2019 USA / Duration: 7 mins
Directed by: Simon Perkins
World Premiere
Jon Wilson lost a leg to cancer at 23. He found joy some years later by developing a solitary routine of skinning and climbing up a ski mountain on his remaining leg, at night, and skiing back down. Wilson wrote and narrates this tone poem about perseverance and the unexpected gift that came from having been “broken.”
2019 Scotland / Duration: 4 mins
Directed by: Stu Thomson
So long coloring books and cartoons. Goodbye stuffed animals and nap time. Danny MacAskill is your new favorite babysitter ever.
2018 USA / Duration: 4 mins
Directed by: DJ O’Neil, Oliver Hamilton
Artists find a unique way to raise awareness about plastic waste. —Henry Martin, age 15
2018 USA / Duration: 16 mins
Directed by: Justin Taylor Smith
World Premiere
When American professional snowboarder Travis Rice visits his friend Shin Biyajima in Nagano, Japan, the two join up to snowboard some of the best tree runs on the planet. But Biyajima’s life as a professional snowboarder is not just about chasing chest-deep powder. It’s about facing challenges, following his own path and appreciating the divine spirit in nature. In snowboarding, Biyajima has found his motivating force, his ikigai — or reason for being.
2018 USA / Duration: 5 mins
Directed by: Taylor Rees
It may be tempting to think of the world of ski mountaineering as one dominated by brawn. With, admittedly, some brain requirements to help mitigate serious risk factors. But, beauty? Is there room in this burly, testosterone-fueled world for the feminine? And not just for the token female, but for many of the fairer sex? As a pioneer in this often rough-and-tough milieu, Telluride’s own Hilaree Nelson has an unequivocal answer and shows us, by her personal example, how women can do anything men can do (…and better).
2018 USA / Duration: 11 mins
Directed by: Joey Schusler, Craig Grant
Professional photographers inhabit a rarefied space where the chances of success are negligible, at best. Narrow the niche to adventure/nature photography and — f-stopping the focus down even further — to life as a biking photographer, and you’re in Dan Milner’s world. It stretches from cloud-hung valleys in the Alps to baking hot Ethiopian villages. And to anywhere and everywhere in between that a passion for the perfect shot and two wheels can get him.
2019 USA / Duration: 25 mins
Directed by: Jordan Halland
World Premiere
Everest-obsessed since childhood, Robert “Rusty” Bailey fulfilled his dream of joining an Everest expedition in 1982. He was buried in an avalanche that killed several Sherpas, but dug himself out. After a rest day, the summit attempt resumed, and Rusty cheated death a second time. This portrait of a professional climber asks the big question: Is it worth it?
2019 USA/Canada / Duration: 4 mins
Directed by: Ryan Heffernan, Grayson Schaffer
“Am I a crazy person?” downhill mountain biker Casey Brown asks in this short film. Decide for yourself as you watch her negotiate the massive drops, huge gaps and puckering lines of southern Utah.
2019 USA / Duration: 9 mins
Directed by: Tim Kemple
World Premiere
Sverri Steinholm grew up chasing sheep up and down the rugged, breathtaking slopes of the Faroe Islands. Today he is a pastor of the Lutheran Church, the dominant religion on the island. He is also a compulsive runner, finding solace and spiritual refuge from personal conflicts and the burdens of priesthood on the trails and roads of his homeland. He may inhabit a very different world, but his words will ring true to anyone who has found peace in nature. “Somehow I am driven to it,” he says. “The body needs it, or my soul, my mind.”