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SELL OUT WEEKEND: ADVENTURE TRAVEL FILM FESTIVAL 2014


What moment would you pick as the standout moment in a weekend of adventure travel films, workshops and presentations camping and bush craft, organised by Lois Pryce and Austin Vince? It’s a tough call.

You may have been baffled by Tim Cope and Chris Hatherley’s fourteen month trip from Russia, across Serbia and Mongolia, to Beijing, enduring cold, hunger, exhaustion and frostbite. The two twenty year old guys from Australia shared a tent, their sleeping and waking hours, and the arduous journey in ‘Off The Rails’ (2001).

Maybe you were impressed by the nomadic Bakhtiari people in the 1976 film ‘People of the Wind,’ filmed by Anthony Howarth, making the annual migration across the Iranian mountains, leading their flock from Summer to Winter pasture.  With speaking much, without visible signs of communication or affection, the families are individually focussed on their roles: small children carry their younger siblings, lambs or puppies, colts or calves, along hazardous and narrow mountain trails, adults shove and poke at reluctant mules and cows as they stumble on the harsh terrain, men heave sheep across an icy, fast flowing river. They make the journey because they have to.

Americans Josh Thomas and J J Kelley didn’t have to follow the sacred river from source to sea in the funny and delightful ‘Go Ganges’ (2011), and British guys Alastair Humphreys and Leon McCarron didn’t have to attempt to retrace Thesiger’s steps in another endurance test in ‘Into The Empty Quarter’ but in both cases – and other festival films too – these young men want to go beyond the safe, the known and the predictable, and to push themselves, conquer difficulties, and achieve a goal well beyond the ordinary.

In most trips there comes a low point, where the conditions become too hard, the travellers are exhausted, morale is low and, worst of all, you question yourself and what the hell you’re doing. At just this point, in an astonishingly intimate close up Alastair Humphreys lets out an agonised wail right into camera, ‘Why can’t I be happy in one place, like normal people?!’ It was a brave decision to keep this moment of private pain in the documentary when it could so easily have been cut, but who are ‘normal’ people, and how can he know they’re happy?

That was the moment I’ll remember: for his honesty and courage in sharing it, and for the question itself, which all of us who travel ask ourselves, because standing still is not an option. Travel for the Bakhtiari people was for survival, yet they would still resist being settled by their government in one place. For many of us travel is about change and learning, and our many and varied journeys, whether local or global, respond to that ancient nomadic part of ourselves that makes us curious and restless. What’s around the next corner? No idea, but the Adventure Travel Film Festival will be running again next August to inspire us, and to remind us that we’re in good company.
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