Vancouver International Mountain Film Fest on Tour

Gripped Magazine April 13, 2015

The Vancouver International Mountain Film Festival (VIMFF) took place in February with its largest turnout to date.

Sufferfest 2: Desert Alpine, on tour with the VIMFF in 2015.

By Drew Copeland

The Vancouver International Film Festival Tour is well underway. The initial festival and awards took place in Vancouver in mid-February. Now, the tour portion of the festival is a month in, having showed at a variety of locations in the West including: Campbell River; Winnipeg; Haines Junction; Yellowknife; Anchorage, Alaska and Leavenworth, Washington.

“We are growing the VIMFF Tour to bring incredible mountain films to more cities around the globe, with possibly double the number of Tour events in 2015 than in 2014,” says Marc Hewitt, Director of Operations at VIMFF. “The VIMFF Tour has predominantly visited cities in the Pacific Northwest, but that is about to change with this expansion. Not only are we adding shows across Canada and throughout the USA, but we expect the VIMFF Tour will likely visit Europe, Africa, and South America in the next year.”

True to the ethos of the mountain recreation, the films span a variety of approaches to movie making and embarking into the hills. Some are long, others are short; some are about professionals and are professionally produced, others are by amateurs; some are narratively driven, while others are visual masterpieces. Regardless of the details, all the films convey a story of human endeavors in elevated places and are pretty cool to experience.

“I am excited to see what the future holds for the VIMFF Tour,” says Hewitt.

Last week, at the Normand Bouchard Memorial Theatre on UBC campus, the tour showed six of the 31 tour films:

Icefall