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Each winter in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, The Alpinist Film Festival celebrates the adventure lifestyle across disciplines and generations with three nights of skiing, surfing and climbing films. The Festival's mission—to advance the art of cinematographic storytelling as it underscores the unity among the adventure lifestyle communities—is complemented by its philanthropic focus: a portion of every year's proceeds are donated to charities that help preserve places adventure athletes like to play. Because one of these places is the planet, the Festival is a carbon-neutral event, using carbon offsets to counteract its carbon footprint.
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This spring, The Alpinist Film Festival comes to Bend, OR for an exclusive one-night screening.
The 2008 Alpinist Film Festival features the festival’s signature elements, including a cocktail hour with New Belgium beer, a live DJ and a silent auction, as it screens more than two hours’ of award-winning films. |
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6:00 PM
The Bend event will kick off at 6 p.m. with a party. Food, wine and New Belgium beer will be available, and a local DJ will spin tunes to get the crowd in the mood for the films that follow. Audience members will be able to bid on a wide selection of items during the silent auction, proceeds from which will benefit SurfAid International, the 2008 AFF’s featured non-profit.
7:00 PM Films
Presented by Christian Beckwith, editor-in-chief of Alpinist Magazine and the director of the Film Festival.
The lineup for the evening in Bend will showcase a number of the 2008 AFF People’s Choice award-winning films, many of which were US or world premieres.
- Peter Mortimer’s Diamonds Are Forever, featuring world-renowned rock climber Steph Davis on her free solo of the Diamond, won the People’s Choice Award for Stone Night.
- Snow Night’s Mountain Town: The Grasshopper, which highlights the charming and humble telemark skiing phenomenon Nick Devore, was one of the audience favorites from Snow Night.
- Audiences also applauded The Beckoning Silence (the film adaptation of Joe Simpson's bestselling book), which follows Simpson to the North Face of the Eiger.
- And the surf film/social documentary Sliding Liberia, which follows a group of surfers who travel to Liberia in search of perfect waves, won both the People’s Choice Award for Surf Night and the Grand Prize Award for the entire 2008 AFF.
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The Alpinist Film Festival recognizes that the places of our athletic and spiritual inspiration often need our help. Each year, the Festival chooses one non-profit organization as its designated charity. Proceeds from the Festival are donated to the charity in the Festival's name (nearly $20,000 to date), and the charity is showcased throughout the Festival to bring awareness to its cause. The 2008 Alpinist Film Festival proudly supports SurfAid International as its featured non-profit.
SurfAid International was founded in 2000 by Dr. Dave Jenkins, who the year before had traveled to the islands off the western coast of Sumatra in search of perfect waves. What he found instead were people suffering and dying from the ravages of malaria and other preventable diseases, Dr. Dave founded SurfAid, an organization dedicated to the alleviation of human suffering through community-based health programs. SurfAid currently features seven programs in 234 village that help the more than 100,000 residents overcome deadly, yet very preventable, diseases.
The mission of SurfAid is to improve the health of people living in isolated regions connected to us through surfing. For more information about SurfAid, and to make a tax-deductible donation, please visit the SurfAid International website.
ABOUT CHRISTIAN BECKWITH
Christian Beckwith began climbing in Wales in 1990. In 1993, he was lured to the Tetons by an article on alpine rock, and has called Jackson home ever since. In 1994 he started a Teton-based climbing 'zine, The Mountain Yodel. He edited The American Alpine Journal from 1996 until 2002, when he left to start Alpinist with Marc Ewing. In 2005, he started The Barry Corbet Film Festival (now The Alpinist Film Festival). Beckwith's climbing has taken him to Kyrgyzstan, Peru, Tibet, Alaska and across Asia and Europe, but these days he feeds the rat most often in the peaks above Jackson Hole. |