We recently launched a new website and with that has come a new blog!
From now on, you can find us over at www.mountainfilm.org/blog.
Felt Soul Media has been at it again. This clip might make you wish winter would stick around for just a little longer.
Enjoy!
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/22149313]
Some of our special guests this year are hailing all the way from Scandinavia: the Baffin Babes. If you’re not familiar with these adventurous ladies, the Baffin Babes are four Scandinavian women who, in 2009, skied 1,200 kilometers across Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic. Their adventure faced them with everything from 40 below weather to hanging with polar bears. We caught up with Baffin Babe Emma Simonsson to learn more.
What inspired you to put together this expedition?
Our love and passion for the outdoors, and a dream of living among the nature for a longer time. Also the attraction of adventure, where you seek challenges and push your own limits.
What was the hardest part of the expedition? What was the most rewarding?
The hardest day was actually the last day, when we all realized it was over. It was such a big sorrow, none of us wanted it to be over, and we moved in slow motion trying to make the day longer. But of course there were hard parts while out as well, for example handling the extreme cold temperatures, and when we skied over a glacier area and big crevasses opened up in all directions in front of us, and the visibility were poor. Most rewarding was the feeling of freedom that I get when I’m out for such a long time, the feeling of being so present in what’s now, so alive. I get in to a meditative flow while skiing and then you get to share it all with your best friends, that’s amazing! And some of the highlights were definitely bathing in a seal hole, climbing broad peaks and having a polar bear just 30 meters away!
Tweet Topic Explorer is a fun online tool that retrieves recent tweets and displays the most common words in those tweets. The area of the circles is proportional to word frequency. Words that are most often used together are grouped and given the same color. This is a great way to get a feel for what’s most on our minds at the moment!
The Pine Ride Indian Reservation in South Dakota is home of the Lakota Sioux and has been called “ground zero” for Native American Issues.
The grim statistics on reservations like Pine Ridge today are the equivalent to that of a 3rd world country, revealing the legacy of colonization and treaty violations. Unemployment on the Reservation fluctuates between 80-90%. Many are homeless, and those with homes are packed into rotting buildings with up to 5 families. More than 90% of the population lives below the federal poverty line. The life expectancy for men is 47 years old — roughly the same as Afghanistan and Somalia.
Photojournalist Aaron Huey has spent the last six years uncovering the story of this relatively undocumented social injustice. We’re honored to have Huey attend this year’s festival as a special guest.
Thanks for reading our blog series. To read from the beginning, go here. We want to express our sincere gratitude and appreciation to everyone who has supported us, most notably our families, our friends in Telluride, and the folks at Mountainfilm who provided the inspiration to undertake our journey and a forum to share our experience.
We really appreciate you reading our blog posts these past months. Some were long, some were short, some were pretty good, and some were probably a little less interesting than you might have hoped. We conveyed our experience here in Ghana as best we knew how, but sometimes, words just don’t suffice. So for this week’s blog post, please enjoy a selection of photos from our trip. No reading involved!
Vodpod videos no longer available.
A new uranium mining boom is threatening further harm to the people, water, wildlands and biodiversity of the Grand Canyon region.
The Obama administration is considering a plan that would protect up to 1 million acres of the Grand Canyon’s watersheds from new uranium mining. But only one of the alternatives they’re considering — Alternative B — affords protections across the entire 1 million acre watershed.
Power in the Pristine filmmaker James Q Martin, part of Rios Libres, put together this PSA, narrated by Craig Childs, to bring people to action.
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/22855650]Martin reminds us that May 4th is the last day the government will be accepting public comments, so take action by visiting www.ProtectGrandCanyon.org today.
The Denver Art Museum is hosting Streets of Afghanistan this Thursday, April 28, in an effort to connect communities and cultures in a country that has endured nearly four decades of conflict. The exhibit is a life-size exhibition that recreates the streets of Kabul and the rural roads of Afghanistan, including stunning portraits of the people who live there.
Proceeds from the exhibition, created by Mountain2Mountain (M2M), a Colorado-based nonprofit, will support programs including girls’ education, efforts to help imprisoned women and children and support for the Afghan youth movement. We are honored to welcome Shannon Galpin, the founder of M2M, as a special guest to the Mountainfilm Festival this year.
When: April 28, 2011
Where: Denver Art Museum — 100 West 14th Avenue Parkway
Earlier this month, over 10,000 climate activists convereged on Washington D.C. for Powershift 2011, national youth climate summit.
Bill McKibben and Tim DeChristopher were both on hand with powerful speeches.
You can catch both McKibben and DeChristopher as special guests at this year’s festival.
Congratulations to artist Antrim Caskey who was recently announced as a winner of the 43rd Annual Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards for her work ‘Dragline,’ a photographic expose of mountaintop removal coal mining.
“The winners this year reflect the interests of Robert Kennedy, particularly in justice and the plight of the downtrodden,” said RFK Journalism Committee Chair Margaret Engel. “From the creative use of cartooning to illustrate solutions to poverty, to the persistence of a reporter continuing to cover America’s prisoners in Cuba, the journalists brought originality and passion to their work. From obvious places of misery, including Haiti and Afghanistan, to the still-sensitive issue of campus rapes and their unseen collateral damage, the winning journalists put their talents to use on behalf of people endangered by violence and destruction.”
The Conversation 