The UNM Wilderness Alliance and Southwest Film Center hope to bring the beauty, the inspirational and the excitement and thrill of the outdoors through the Telluride Mountain Film Festival, held this weekend.
The Telluride Mountain Film Festival is composed of about 15 videos ranging anywhere from two minutes to 45 minutes in length.
The content of the films vary their focus on nature’s presence, its beauty a prevalent theme throughout the whole film festival. Topics included in the project range from environmental sustainability to recreational outdoor sports.
The Telluride Mountain Film Festival provides students with the opportunity to gain knowledge of the excitement and joy outdoor activities bring, environmental issues currently surrounding them and involvement with the local community in one or both areas.
Stephanie Mladinich, UNM Wilderness Alliance president, said there is so much student interest in this topic on campus, and the festival is a great way to increase student engagement even further.
Mladinich said delivering insightful views about the environment is not what the project is about, but rather establishing methods of involvement along with providing resources that enable students to proactively pursue any outdoor interests within their local community.
“We have actually brought in environmental groups from around Albuquerque that students can get involved in,” Mladinich said. “By getting involved in groups like the Mountaineering Club or Wilderness Alliance students get both sides: advocacy and recreation.”
Using film as the medium allows the audience to be captured and placed in the outdoors. It is from this perspective that the films inspire and challenge the viewers to experience this firsthand, to have fun outdoors, be exhilarated with activities and projects about nature.
“In the medium of film this is about the coolest thing in the world,” said William Dole, director of the Southwest Film Center, located at the UNM theater in the SUB. “Film is such an assessable art form that bringing these different environmental themes into it raises awareness about these things.”
The first showing of films will be Friday from 6:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. There will be an additional two showings on Saturday from 3:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. Each showing will be hosted at the Student Union Building movie theater and will cost $7 a person.
There will also be a reception with Jack Loeffler, an environmental activist and close friend of Edward Abbey after the event on Friday, in which he will be dong a talk back with the viewers.
This is the second year that the Wilderness Alliance and Southwest Film Center have collaborated for an event like this. Dole said last year's attendance reached almost 100 people.
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“UNM Wilderness Alliance reached out to Southwest Film Center to create this kind of co-sponsorship last year,” he said. “They brought the film festival and it was a big success last year and we wanted to keep that partnership going, hopefully for the next few years to come.”
Isaiah Jordan is a culture reporter at the Daily Lobo. He can be reached at culture@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @DailyLobo.
