The kendal film festival is a superb event to watch the best outdoor films, listen to adventurers talking about thier experiences and a great place get inspired for your own expeditions. Definite highlights were watching the premier of Wide Boyz – an awesome climbing film about offwidth climbing, listening to the highly motivated Tim Emmet talk about Helkman falls and flying off the Trango towers. Listening to Karen Darke talk of her incredible achievments in the paralympics, and watching films made by up and coming talents like Jen Randall in ‘Push it’, a great documentary about Big Wall climbing in Yosemite. I suppose the only negative point was having to sit through Andy Mouncey patronise the crowd for an hour at the Adidas event.
The festival is awesome however I think the best thing about it though is the chance to meet up with your mates and to discuss and plan your own adventures. Saturday night over several beers (and shots) saw the coming together of Brazil Big Wall Team comprising of Dave Gladwin, Mike ‘Twid’ Turner, John Roberts and myself. It was the first time we had met together as a group and is was great to chat about an objective we had discussed over email to get some momentum and psyche for the trip. It was also great to meet Jen Randall who is keen to get involved and come with us to Brazil to film it.
Knowing how hard Twid, Dave and John climb it’s clear I’ll have to do a lot of training. I’ve never bolted on lead or even climbed a big wall so it’s going to be a pretty big learning curve but should be an awesome experience!
