As winter rolls into North Bend, so do the mountain sport athletes for the eighth annual Mountain Film Festival, hosted by the historic North Bend Theater.
The Mountain Film Festival is a series showing independent movies and short films focusing on mountain sports, athletics and physical trials. The series concludes with the Banff Film Festival, an amateur film competition, and a new film by Warren Miller, a prolific sports film director.
Cindy Walker, owner of the North Bend Theater, explained that the film festival was started in collaboration with two other North Bend residents.
“The idea really came about in a collaboration with Martin Volken and Guy Lawrence, they approached me after I bought the theater,” Walker said.
Since then the film series has matured into a yearly event that, on every Sunday from October to early December, runs winter sport-themed films. It has even become a stop on the tour of the internationally known Banff Mountain Film Festival, which is one of the most popular events for the theater.
“After the first year, Martin was able to bring the Banff Film Festival to North Bend. We are the smallest venue they come to,” Walker said. “This year the Banff Film Festival sold out in six days.”
The series ends on the first Saturday of December with a screening of the North Bend Amateur Film Challenge winners and a showing of Warren Miller’s 66th snow sports film “Chasing Shadows.”
Walker said that the series brings people from all over the state and beyond into North Bend, which is not only good for the theater but also for the other businesses in town.
“It brings the mountain community into town. There is a consistent, core audience that comes to see these films and they come from all over,” Walker said. “It’s a great gathering spot to build that local mountain community.”
The series also attracts filmmakers from outside of the U.S. including Sandra Lahnsteiner, an Austrian director who is debuting her all-female, high-performance skiing film “Shades of Winter: PURE,” on Nov. 15 at the Mountain Film Festival.
“We are her only venue, we are her only U.S. showing,” Walker said.
Walker explained that the hardest part of putting together this series is getting entries for the amateur film competition (www.northbendtheatre.com/amateurfilmchallenge.html), but they are working hard to get the word out to people who would be interested in participating.
Despite any bumps along the way, Walker said bringing the community together around this series is one of the best rewards of putting it on year after year.
“It’s rewarding, It’s building an audience that we didn’t have,” Walker said. “And I get to see some really interesting films.”
