Felicitaciones a Federico (Fuco)!! The Banff Centre Report to the Community Winter 2007-2008 ha publicado un articulo acerca de la pelicula “La Ventana”, filmada durante la expedicion Venezolana a la Patagonia en el 2007. Esta pelicula ha sido seleccionada para el World Tour del Banff Mountain Film Festival. Si no han tenido el chance de verla, tienen la oportunidad de hacerlo en el Tour Mundial del Banff!
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Mountain films, mountain stories
by Jill Sawyer
The film La Ventana opens on a group of Venezuelan climbers getting ready to summit the sheer spire of Patagonia’s Cerro Torre. An immense jagged tooth, Cerro Torre is one of the world’s most daunting ascents. The scene is raw, placing the audience on the mountain with the climbers. What makes it all the more remarkable is that it is the creation of a first-time filmmaker.
La Ventana is the debut film of Federico Pisani, a biologist and outdoorsman based in Caracas, Venezuela. Using basic technology (much of the action is first-person and handheld, the camera passed among his climbing buddies), Pisani has produced a work that gets at the essence of mountain adventure. This year, La Ventana will be seen by tens of thousands of people around the world as part of the Banff Mountain Film Festival World Tour. The story of how this debut film reached such a large audience is emblematic of the opportunities available to filmmakers through The Banff Centre.
In late spring of 2007, Seana Strain, world tour co-ordinator, was invited to attend the Ascenso film festival in Caracas, one of the premier opportunities for Latin and South American filmmakers and photographers working in adventure film. Ascenso organizers invited Strain to deliver a series of talks to established and aspiring filmmakers about submitting their films to the Banff Mountain Film Festival competition. She identified a few films from Ascenso 2007, including La Ventana, and encouraged their directors to submit them to Banff.
She also invited a group of eight South American filmmakers and world tour hosts to attend the Centre’s Adventure Filmmakers’ Seminar, an intensive week-long course in conceiving, pitching, developing, shooting, and editing an adventure feature, short, or documentary. Facilitated in 2007 by Michael Brown, Emmy Award-winning director and cinematographer, and Richard Else, documentary filmmaker for the BBC, the seminar is one of the only intensive programs of its kind in the world. During the week of the seminar, Pisani’s film was picked up for inclusion on the tour.
“The people I’ve met in Banff are passionate about the same things I am,” Pisani said after finishing the seminar. “They’ve inspired me to make more complex films.”
For Chilean mountaineer Carlos Bascou, the seminar was an opportunity to take his filmmaking skills to a higher level. Involved in the 2001 first Chilean ascent of Makalu in the Himalayas, he made a small film about the expedition, and followed it up with footage shot on this year’s first Chilean ascent of Nanga Parbat, which he brought to Banff with him.
“The best part of the seminar was getting to know people who are working at the highest level of (adventure filmmaking) in the world,” Bascou says.
Gabriel Wald was one of three colleagues attending the seminar from the Caracas-based television production company Artico. He has been working for two years on a film about Venezuela’s Aboriginal people. Viewing a number of films about mountain cultures and environments as part of the seminar was a highlight for him, as well as learning from other filmmakers in the same genre. “The seminar made us realize that many of our mistakes had been made before by other filmmakers,” he says. “That gives us confidence.”
Through the festival, the tour, and the seminar, the spirit of Banff has spread to South and Latin America. In addition to the growth of Ascenso, Strain cites tour stops in Mexico and Chile that have added their own screening nights devoted to the work of local filmmakers. “All of this grew out of the tour,” she says. “Local people in all these locations have become very interested in telling their own mountain stories.”
The Adventure Filmmakers’ Seminar is supported by Patagonia and The North Face.