Disclaimer: The author is a staff member of Cornell Outdoor Education, which presented the films.
I had always marveled at people who travel for film festivals. I had never been to a film festival before, but my cousins and friends who had gone to seemingly random locations so they could watch never-before-seen, glacially-paced art films for fun seemed to be, against all odds, enjoying themselves. So there I was, sitting in Bailey Hall surrounded by grandparents and climbing wall instructors to attend my first film festival, where the pacing wasn’t glacial, but the subject matter was.
Every year, the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity hosts the Banff Centre Mountain Film Festival, which features dozens of so-called “mountain films” in order to celebrate global outdoor exploration and sport. After the festival concludes in November, the Banff Centre selects a number of entries to exhibit at certain locations around the world. This past weekend, Cornell Outdoor Education hosted two screenings of six films each as part of the Banff Centre Mountain Film Festival World Tour.
I attended the first sextet of films on Saturday, Feb. 21, in what was called the Moraine film program. Ranging from two to 47 minutes long, the Moraine films were not all about mountains, despite what the festival’s name might suggest. The two shortest films, Deluge and Cold Calls - Japan, were mostly cinematic clips of bikers and skiers, respectively. Each depicted their subjects battling through the elements, be it heavy rain on the forest trail or two-foot snow in Hokkaido. Scenes of the subjects tearing through the trails and slopes provided for some epic slow-motion shots for our entertainment. The films weren’t all action-packed, however. The Hive Architect depicted an elderly man, Matt Somerville, and his quaint life as an idiosyncratic honeybee conservationist driven by childlike wonder in the farms of rural England. His goal wasn’t to harvest his beehives for honey, but rather to create habitats for wild honey bees around England to counteract declining biodiversity and habitat loss.
The last three films, each over 25 minutes long, took up nearly two hours of the two-and-a-half-hour program and were more focused on storytelling within outdoor sport. A Baffin Vacation, Love on Ice follows Erik and Sarah through their 69-day vacation to Baffin Island, filled with mountains to ski, glaciers to cross, rivers to kayak and gigantic mountain faces to climb. None of it was too extreme for this couple of 12 years, however, both of whom have been everywhere from the South Pole to whitewater rapids leading into waterfalls. While the casual, lighthearted exposition of the fact that these two had crossed hundreds of kilometers of harsh, inhabitable land in 24-hour bursts impressed me, it mostly made it all feel doable, as if anyone with enough grit and determination could, like Erik and Sarah, scale the wall of a mountain that was thousands of feet high.
Dissidence, meanwhile, covered the lives of two twin brothers, Raviandi and Ravianto Ramadhan, both of whom are professional rock climbers from Indonesia. Fully self-financed and self-trained, the film shows the journey the two have made to the climbing World Championships to establish Indonesia as a major competitor in the world of lead climbing. Their journey is not without setbacks; they don’t have the money or support for modern training facilities, let alone anything more than the bare necessities on their trips to competitions. Despite this, they work harder than almost anyone else in the mountain climbing world to get to where they are. “Dissidence” is also the name of a terrifying, upside-down 8C sport climbing route in France that the brothers spend the entire movie learning to climb, finally succeeding at the very end. But their spirited act of rebellion against their situation in pursuit of their dreams is also dissidence to them. Dissidence is a battle cry for everyone — climbers and non-climbers alike — to demonstrate that in time, people are able to complete even the most daunting projects.
My favorite film, and the winner of the 2025 Banff Mountain Film Festival’s Best Film: Mountain Sports award, was Best Day Ever, a humanistic success story centered around adaptive mountain biking, directed by Ben Knight and Berne Broudy. Adaptive mountain bikes are primarily for those who are paralyzed due to spinal cord injuries, no longer able to use their legs to bike. To accommodate for this, adaptive mountain bikes either use arm pedals or motors and by design require two wheels at the front and one at the back. This different setup means that many traditional biking trails are completely unusable for adaptive bikers, some of whom receive their injuries on these very trails. Best Day Ever describes how the people of Richmond, Vermont rallied behind local adaptive mountain bikers Greg Durso and Allie Bianchi and built accessible mountain biking trails for everyone to use. The emotional subject matter lent itself to raw interviews with Greg and Allie, who showed that they were never discouraged by their injuries from continuing to lead active lives, nor that they ever felt sorry for themselves. Best Day Ever is an essential watch for anyone with an interest in outdoors and advocacy.
Being able to watch these films entered into the Banff Mountain Film Festival further increased my respect for the community of outdoors explorers. Whether it was watching people re-learning how to partake in outdoor sport after life-altering injuries or seeing a couple climb (as opposed to hike) mountains that were thousands of feet tall in an otherworldly landscape, the sheer variety of outdoors endeavors that have provided countless people entire lives of fulfillment reassures me that I can always find contentment in nature. If you’re ever lost in life, all you need to do is head to the middle of nowhere.
Gustavo Ponzoa is a member of the Class of 2029 in the College of Arts and Sciences. He is a contributor for the Arts & Culture department and can be reached at gap87@cornell.edu.
