Reel Paddling Film Festival 2011

Lined up outside the Bagdad for the film festival.

The Reel Paddling Film Festival made it's annual visit Portland this week thanks to Alder Creek Kayak and Willamette Riverkeeper.  As usual it was held at the McMenamins Bagdad Theater & Pub.   The Bagdad is a great place for events like this as you get your pizza and beer while enjoying a movie in a comfortable atmosphere.  Tim (my ride for this outing) and I were able to navigate traffic and cross town in 45 minutes to arrive right at 6pm for the doors to open.

Being a paddling film festival, you get a very focused audience. It was like having a super sized kayak club meeting.  Through the various outings and classes I've had, I probably knew more people in the theater that evening than I know at work.  This year there was a kayak which was raffled off at the end and a special twist on the last film of the evening.  We got to choose the last film of the evening.  Either the best sea kayaking or the best canoeing film of the 2011 film festival.  With a whole theater full of paddlers, most of whom are sea kayakers, I knew what our last film was going to be.

Beer, pizza, and movies.

This years selection of movies were all very good for their own reasons.   The festival opened up with Halo Effect by Steve Fisher.  I like watching white water films, but I find that too many of them are a series of waterfall drops which lasts for 60 minutes.  Through good cinematography and a compelling narrative, Halo Effect had much better staying power than your average white water kayaking film.




Our second film for the evening was Tanker Love.  This film follows a group of Hawaiian Life Guards visiting Galveston Texas in an effort to raise peoples awareness of the destruction that still exists from Hurricane Ike.  Oh, and while they are in Galveston they use standup paddle boards to surf tanker wakes that would run for 5 miles.




While I can not say that I liked our third movie the best, it is the one which I have thought the most about.  Solo is a documentary about the attempted trip from Australia to New Zealand by Andrew McAuley in 2007.  He was an IT professional, with a wife and young son, who quit his job to attempt a kayaking journey which most people considered impossible.  Aspects of this story hit very close to me and I imagine many others in the audience.  Previously, at the end of each film we all clapped to show our appreciation of the effort and quality of the production.  The somber mood of the film hit everyone so deeply that nearly all of us forgot to applaud.  After the credits had finished rolling and the film festival logo was showing on the screen, one person from the back of the theater began to clap.  By the third clap we all were jolted out of our personal reflections and gave the same appreciation applause we gave for the other films.  A man sitting off to my right said, "It's hard to clap for that one".  It's a very good film which is hard to like.








After Solo, the next two short films greatly lightened the mood.  Season: Fall and Small Hydro Power.








And finally we came to the last movie of the evening.  Was it going to be a canoe or sea kayaking movie.  I just knew that it was going to be the sea kayaking flick, until the details of the films were announced.  The best canoe film of 2011 was made by Frank Wolf.  His previous film, Borealis, was the most entertaining movie of the evening at the previous festival.  Suddenly I'm thinking that we might be in danger of watching the wrong movie.  I would guess that we were at least 80% sea kayakers with myself included.  Whichever film got the most applause was the one we were going to watch.  First up was the sea kayaking film.  The applause was good and I was wondering if the canoe film had a chance (along with probably everyone else who wanted it).   The voting for the canoe film came next and I clapped hard enough to make my hands numb.  So did everyone else who wanted it.  We soundly suppressed the sea kayak vote and got to watch Mammalian by Frank Wolf.   It was a very entertaining trip through the interior of Canada starting at Yellowknife and traveling to Rankin Inlet.  A number of mammals are encounted in the journey including the very rare snow leopard.






The final event of the evening was to raffle off the kayak.  Unlike most raffles for something this nice I was not up against thousands of other people.  It was my three tickets up against the tickets held by my fellow paddlers in the same great hall.  After a few moments of tension we all found out that the holder of ticket 662 had just won a kayak with paddle, life jacket, and car transport system.  A cheer from the upper deck let us all know where the winner was.  In that moment I discovered a reason to make sure that I attend this film festival again next year.  Maybe I'll be the person holding 662 next time.