I have been to several of the Banff Mountain Film Festival showings in theatres over the years, and yet have never seen anything relating to caving. Do they not like us? There must be plenty of short films being made in the U.K., Europe, and the USA that would showcase our fantastic sport of caving, but no! I wonder why this is?

I don't know much about Banff but I do know that the organisers of the Kendal Mountain Festival claim to have overtaken Banff as the largest mountain film festival in the world.

The Kendal Festival does have a significant caving element thanks to initially people like Matt Burke and Clive Allen and then more recently by volunteers like Steph Dwyer, Jane and myself.  The Underground Session last year featured the New Zealand film Ironstone which was brilliant.  The year before the sensitive film on anorexia based around the guys love of photographing Scottish caves.  There has also been the premier of the Ario Dream by Paul Diffely.

This year there is likely to be another caving film shown separately to the Underground Session and the session itself will feature Caver Keith's top ten and two other talks.

So....who needs Banff 

Thanks Badlad. I was fortunate enough to go to Banff a couple of times, as did Clive, and with Paul Diffley too.  In response to ptpeaty? a part of our reason for going was to look at all of their film submissions (not just those selected for the Festival or the Tour) to find films that we may want to encourage submission of to KMF.  I obviously made a beeline for anything caving related, which over the years amounted to one film made by a chap called John Waller, who also made ?Treeverse?. KMF also received a list each year of Banff?s submissions, and there were only ever a couple over the many years i was involved. Not sure why this is!? KMF received quite a few for a couple of years pre 2010. The Banff Festival Team were, and are, very open minded, so it?s not by design that caving related films are not submitted or shown. I would suggest it?s a cultural thing/habit, and would strongly encourage submission of caving films to them, as well as lecture proposals around books published etc. since they are also very strong on literature.

Matt,
I would be interested to know what few caving films have been included in the Banff program of films in the last 10 years as I have been going for around 8 years and nothing has featured. I believe Ario Dreams was in their program presented in Finland some years back but bizarrely, it was not included in the U.K. presentation.

It?s things like Banff that give sports broader public coverage and hence possibly attract more folk into caving.

I have just received this from Banff?.

Hi Paul, thank you so much for your email and feedback. We would really love to show a film about caving but very few of them are entered into the festival - probably in no small part because of the difficultly in filming in a cave environment. There have been one or two over the years but they haven't been good enough to include in the tour. There is a film that has been entered into the recent festival that features some caving - we're really hopeful it will be included on the Tour because we'd love to share a new sport with our audience. Keep your eyes out for it!
Thanks again Paul,

So, all you established and budding film makers, contact Banff and offer up your films to them and get some decent exposure for our fantastic sport.