Film cameras aiming high

The most spectacular and original images narrating in an innovative way (also using 3D tecnology) the mountains, the relation between man and nature, the everyday life of those who live and work in the high lands in every corner of the planet and the most extreme adventures. There is all this in the 108 works, selected out of over 330 documentary and fiction films, the public will be able to admire on the screens of the TrentoFilmfestival, the oldest and most prestigious international festival featuring mountain cinema, scheduled from 29 April to 9 May. In the international contest section 38 films will compete for the prizes of the TrentoFilmfestival, first and foremost the Gran Premio Città di Trento – Gold Gentian and they will be judged by the International Jury, this year composed of the film director Maurizio Zaccaro, the Finnish documentarist Lena Paasanen, the documentarist Michele Radici, the French photographer and documentarist René Vernadet, and the Slovakian alpinist Alan Formanek.

This year’s programme, from 29 April to 9 May, under the artistic direction of Maurizio Nichetti, will as always feature important national and international previews. Among the most awaited, the first screening in the Italian language of Nanga Parbat, which the film director Joseph Vilsmaier – winner in 1996 at the TrentoFilmfestival with the film Schlafes Bruder (based on the best seller novel Le voci del mondo by Robert Schneider) – made in collaboration with the alpinist Reinhold Messner. The film narrates the tragic expedition in Pakistan in 1970 to Nanga Parbat – the ninth highest mountain on earth - in which Messner’s brother, Günther, was hit by an avalanche at the end of an adventurous descent on the unexplored side of Diamir. Reinhold searched for him, without success, and finally descended alone, appearing in base camp six days later with serious frostbite on his feet and he had to have six toes amputated. In 2005, when the body of Günther was found at an altitude of 4,300 metres, at the foot of the Diamir wall, the last word was written on the accusations made by some of the expedition members against Reinhold Messner for having abandoned his brother in difficulty.

In the waters of the Antarctic the 37 Greenpeace idealists on board the ship Esperanza, fight their battle trying with all means to interpose themselves as a human shield between the whales and the Japanese harpoons. The documentary Jagdzeit by the German Angela Graas narrates the personal stories of this multinational crew, the realities of life on board the ship, their problems, the fear of failure and missing home.

Equally impressive are the images of the documentary Petropolis by the Canadian filmmaker Peter Mettler denouncing one of the devastating industrial, capital and energy projects, in which petroleum power wins over
the climate, air, water and land. A unique view (filmed mainly from a helicopter) of the largest installation in the world for the extraction of bitumen from the sand, in Canada’s Tar Sands, which has far-reaching impacts on the environment. A deposit of tar as big as England that has swept away the forest and replaced it with the mines.

From various viewpoints two film directors narrate stories of children in the mountains. Set in the arid and majestic landscape of the snow-covered mountains of Zanskar, in the Himalayan region of India, Himalaya le chemin du ciel by the French film director Marianne Chaud (a nomination for the Cesar 2010, the Oscars of the French cinema) narrates the story of the young monks in the Phukthal monastery, and in particular of Kenrap, a child of eight years old who, since the age of five, thinks he is the reincarnation of an old monk. From the time he gets up and washes in the morning at minus 20° C, during his philosophy lessons, while he washes the dishes, or plays with his friends, to the few days holiday he spends with his family, the film director follows him and talks to him while he tells the story of his life. The Rumanian filmmaker Björn Reinhardt in Der Kinderberg narrates instead the life of the children of Obcina, a picturesque mountain village in Romania, who cope with the unexplainable absence of their parents in an admirable way. They work in the vegetable gardens and cook the meals, they look after the cows and sheep, and use a great amount of precious imagination to keep themselves occupied.

The Lebanese mountains around Ain el-Halazoun are the background to the film The one man village by the film director Simon El Habre. Life in this ghost village, whose inhabitants all belong to one family, returns during the day, after the destruction brought by the civil war. The film observes the collective memory of a land that seems to live in a kind of collective amnesia and always remains vulnerable in the face of a possible new civil war. With Le main et la voix, the film director Hamzehian Anush takes us on a journey from Corsica to Friuli, from Nice to Trentino through a whirl of dialects and languages to the discovery of the old game of “morra”, a game that almost seems a magic ritual, with the shouts, fists, fingers, fervour and altered faces of the players.

For the enthusiasts of mountaineering and extreme sports, in preview in Trento, The wildest dream: the conquest of Everest in which the film director Anthony Geffen investigates the mysteries of Everest linked to the first attempt to climb the roof of the world by the mountaineers George Mallory and Andrew Irvine in 1924. Mysteries that were not solved when the body of Mallory was found in 1999. In the documentary, in which the narrating voice is entrusted to the actor Liam Neeson, the alpinists Conrad Anker and Leo Houlding follow in the steps of the two British climbers to the summit. And the most recent news is the announcement of the American historian Tom Holzel of a future expedition to recuperate Irvine’s body and the camera that was not found on Mallory.

Two months in the mountains of the isolated Baffin Island and the new ascents on the walls of Mount Asgard by the Favresse brothers, are revived in the images of Asgard Jamming by the alpinist-filmmaker Sean Villanueva. Alone on the Wall by Peter Mortimer and Nick Rosen narrates the exceptional feat of 23 year old Alex Honnold, one of the strongest and most versatile American climbers: the free solo ascent of the northwest face of the Half Dome in the Yosemite National Park.


Sherpas die wahren Helden am Everest by the film directors Frank Senn, Otto Onnegger and Hari Thapa narrates the work, life and state of mind of the sherpas during a commercial expedition to Everest. In no uncertain terms, they explain what it means for them to work for westerners. We enjoy their successes, see how they risk their lives to save other people’s. The heroes of this feature film are Long Dorjee, a legendary figure with 13 climbs on Everest, and Norbu, the young sirdar, who leads a modern life in Kathmandu.

Le Monde de Gaston Rebuffat, by Gilles Chappaz is the portrait of the alpinist Gaston Rebuffat who, with his numerous books, films and spectacular pictures, described the mountains, presented them to a large public, highlighted the beauty, poetry and grandeur of the high lands, dispelling the myth of a hard, dangerous and killer world. 20 years after his death, with recorded documents, some never seen before, and exclusive witnesses, the film gives a portrait of this exceptional personage, who occupies a place of honour in the public imagination linked to the mountains.

TrentoFilmfestival presents the Italian preview of L’ultima salita, the third episode of the trilogy on sacred sculpture by the filmmaker Elisabetta Sgarbi. A documentary entirely dedicated to one work by an 18th century Camuno artist, Beniamino Simoni, who made the statues for a via crucis of 14 stations, revealed by the film camera in all its tragic and expressive power. The texts by the authors Giovanni Testori, Vittorio Sgarbi, Erri De Luca and Remo Bodei, read by Toni Servillo, accompany the images in this film that leads to the heart of the soul and art.

Among the fictions in preview in Trento, Loup the latest film by Nicolas Vanier, the director of Il grande nord (Audience prize in 2006). It is the story of an Evenk boy, Sergueï who lives among the Siberian mountains where he looks after a large herd of 3,000 reindeer constantly threatened by wolves. At a young age he was taught to hunt and kill them, but the day he meets a wolf with its four cubs, his life and certainties undergo a radical change. To defend them, Sergueï violates the millenary laws of his people, betraying his father and his clan, familiarizing more and more with the cubs.

Again this year, the evening event on Friday 30 April 2010, in the Auditorium Santa Chiara, will open the festival with the screening of a silent film with live music. Der Heilige Berg (the Sacred Mountain), a film of 1926 by Arnold Fanck, one of the masters of the Bergfilm, a very popular kind of film in the twenties and thirties, interpreted by Leni Riefenstahl and Luis Trenker. The original soundtrack composed by Edmund Meisel will be played by the Haydn di Bolzano and Trento Regional Orchestra conducted by maestro Helmut Imig. At the beginning of the evening the journalist and cinema critics Irene Bignardi and Matthias Fanck, grandson of the film director, will talk about the Bergfilm and its protagonists.