“Luckily I didn’t hurt myself seriously,” Ueli Steck tells the camera after a 65-foot fall down a cliff. This calculating speed climber is the star of The Swiss Machine, the opening film at Santa Cruz’s Banff Mountain Film Festival. “I was pissed about myself because I fell off. That’s an error.”
The mountaineering Alps expert goes on to scale the north face of Switzerland’s Eiger peak in 3 hours and 50 minutes, breaking the previously unshatterable record by an hour, then retreats to a year of training for his next task. He wants to do it faster.
When the Rio Theatre’s red curtain opens for the touring Banff Film Festival this Friday, it will reveal both athletes like Steck and details of their obsessions. Since 1993 the festival, which visits 345 other cities worldwide, has sent Santa Cruzans’ minds parasailing over tropical rain forests and arctic glaciers even while keeping them riveted to the edges of their seats. This weekend The Swiss Machine and 12 other documentary-thrillers pack the two-night annual adrenaline bonanza, which benefits scholarships for UC-Santa Cruz’s Wilderness Orientation backpacking program.
After The Swiss Machine, next in the lineup is Chimera, a mind-numbing, slowed-down 1,000-frame-per-second montage of skiers in action. After that comes Crossing the Ditch, the story of a nauseating, not to mention deadly, 1,400-mile two-person kayak trip from Australia to New Zealand. The dangerous paddle across the treacherous Tasman Sea puts two risk-loving brothers in delirious isolation until the sight of a stranded buoy hits them like the gift of a newborn puppy on Christmas.
The kayaks continue with WildWater, a philosophical examination of why professional thrill-junkies float through towering plumes of white foam that link mountainous peaks to the sea. When it’s time for a breather, Still Motion pulls together a relaxing mix of acoustic guitars and black and white time lapses of cougars, curious fawns and elk jumping in and out of the frame.
After that fades, the theater will stay pitch black for Into Darkness. This story of bone-crushing claustrophobia chronicles cavers who wiggle through small cracks like camels through the eyes of proverbial needles. They close their eyes and twist their heads, attempting to squeeze their arms, chests, legs and ears through tiny gaps. One shifting rock in a tight passage could close a door, sealing their exit and their fate.
On a lighter note, Aptos native Cam McCaul teams up with a few mountain biking buddies-turned-cowboy renegades in Life Cycles, Friday night’s closing film. The wheeling wizards go soaring over cornfields and derelict tractors, leaping out of barnyard windows in slowed-down, snail-like motion.
The adventure doesn’t miss a beat on Saturday night, kicking off with another kayak thriller in Dream Result, which features a world record-breaking 189-foot, four-second waterfall plunge. But the audience can relax. In Kranked Kids, a mountain bike parody for the ages, a small gang of 5-year-olds steals Dad’s pick-up truck in search of mud-sloshing cyclable downhills.
The festival reaches new heights with The Asgard Project as climbers drag themselves up the almost vertical Mt. Asgard in Canada’s Arctic circle. The good-humored bunch celebrates a birthday with a cake made out of a mountainous clump of granola gruel and plays chess with misshapen obsidian and sandstone. The freezing, exhausting search for meaning keeps them sleeping on 3-foot ledges as they chase a base jumping freefall to end all others.
Then it’s off to New Zealand for Last Paradise, a surf film whose four main themes are adventure, science, sustainability and sports innovation, says director Clive Neeson.html.
After 26 minutes in Paradise, India awaits in the politically charged region of Kashmir, which President Clinton once called the most dangerous place in the world. Billa Bakshi and AZADI: Freedom’s other stars sling skis over their shoulders instead of rifles and hit the slopes. According to the film, the freedom of adventure draws eager foreigners, thanks to guides like Bakshi. And the tourism business is revitalizing Kashmir’s economy.
In the spirit of travel, the film festival ends in China, where The Longest Way‘s Christoph Rehage measures his one-year walk from Bejing to Urumqi in kilometers and entertaining self-portraits of his limitless beard growth.
As one climber tells the audience from his narrow, cliff-side camp in The Asgard Project, “This has been a hard experience… Everything about it has been fraught with problems. It’s so cool and relentless and grueling up here. Part of the cool thing about expeditions is wanting to get home, and you appreciate life so much more.”
Luckily for viewers, the Banff Mountain Film Festival promises to send audiences over daunting waterfalls, rapids and mountains while still returning them safely to their seats, so they can get home by 10:30pm and not have to snooze on a 3-foot stone ledge hundreds of feet above the rest of the world.
THE BANFF MOUNTAIN FILM FESTIVAL
Fri-Sat, 7pm both nights
Rio Theatre, 1205 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz
Tickets $15/$12 students at ucscrecreation.com
