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I was delighted to discover this year's goody-bag of dvds arrived this morning, courtesy of www.ame-ski.co.uk so i decided to prioritise my university existence a little bit and gave lectures a miss for the day! instead i embarked on an epic movie marathon with some skiing buddies. a previously unprecedented quantity of pizza, tea and other suitable luxuries were consumed during what will come to be remembered as the "inaugural leeds ski film festival"- the IF3 of the north if you will... well, not quite but we like to think so!
Seven Sunny Days kicked off proceedings and the group agreed that Eric H, Abma, James Heim, Jon TJ and Colby had standout segements. Furthermore, Shane's 007 story went down well and the audience were in shock/awe at the wingsuit insanity...
Next up was lost and found which appealed to the actual skiers (non park rats) amongst us. One and all were amazed by master K. Pietersen's backcountry eptitude, Ian Mac's straight-up lunacy, Sage's smooth approach to super-gnarly lines and Dana Flahr's evidently enormous cojones. The assembled were impressed by Seth's footage, but ultimately let down by its brevity and were left unsatisfied and wanting more. Jermey Jones as always pushed the boundaries in AK, but the most poignant moment of the movie was undoubtedly marc Andre's sit-ski shredding and many park rats in attendance were respectfully embarrassed to admit they would stuggle to ski some of the same terrain as someone paralysed waist down!
By this stage, many of those in attendance, females in particular, were frankly terrifed by what they were witnessing, so a decision was taken to follow with Idea, in order to allow everyone to, lets say, "mellow out" a little. Idea fulfilled this role perfectly. The soundtrack was superb, much of the camera work & editing was brilliant, though we felt the snowboarding segment was neither technically very good nor particularly stylish and as such was deemed not to be in keeping with the rest of this, otherwise lovely slice of cinematography.
Tanner Hall's Believe was to be the last movie of the session and it rounded things off nicely. Many commented that Tanner had really progressed in the BC environment, no doubt having learnt much from the as-ever mercurial Morrison. Kye again was superb and Tony B provided some nice lines. The only gripe we had was that the solitary and distant shot of Seth's 150 ft double front missed the oppurtunity to blow minds, like the moment warranted.
All in all, an excellent session was had by all and the general consensus was that these four movies provided a superb overview of freeskiing today, each showcasing a different aspect of the sport to full effect. We look forward to Yeah Dude and a look back at some classic works such as 1242, Focused and Yearbook to continue the stoke-building mission for the rapidly approaching season, which frankly, can't come soon enough for us Brits!
Thanks go to Matt Duerden (MrScruff) at www.ame-ski.co.uk for providing the audio-visual entertainment (I highly reccommend ame-ski to any europeans or brits looking to buy ski movies), George's pizza take-away for supplying some epic much-needed (pizza) faceshots to munch, Tetleys for hooking us up with first-class teabags, and others who must not be named due to the spurious legality of the "luxuries" they supply!