Five film highlights from the 2019 Kendal Mountain Festival
Isabel Choat
Updated
From a Siberian slackliner who tiptoes across a line slung 100 metres above Lake Baikal to a champion free-diver with seemingly superhuman breath-holding powers, the 2019 Kendal Mountain Festival – taking place this weekend (14-17 November) in the Lake District market town – features extraordinary tales of bravery and endurance. But, among the more extreme stories, there are also tales of the healing power of nature and inspiring stories of women adventurers, older athletes and disabled outdoors lovers.
Here are five highlights from the 103 films being shown over the weekend. Next year the film festival will go on tour, with Kendal film nights running in 22 locations from February to June.
Bob & Marion
Marion Luker (78) and husband Bob (81) have been running marathons for decades. In this inspirational film they talk about why they run – and why they have no intention of stopping. It’s interspersed with footage of them running across Dartmoor’s epic landscape.
Sverri Steinholm is a Lutheran pastor on the Faroe Islands who uses trail running to deal with the challenges of his job. The camera tracks him as he takes on routes through the islands’ wild, rugged terrain.
“It’s the closest I can get to my brain being still.” In Wild Swim, Amy Walker talks honestly about how swimming helps her deal with depression and accept her body shape. In the film, shot at Janet’s Foss waterfall in North Yorkshire, she refers to the great joy she finds in cold-water swimming.
This film follows the story of blind climber Jesse Dufton as he prepares to scale a remote Scottish sea stack, the Old Man of Hoy. He leads the climb, with his partner, Molly, following.
Premiering at the festival, this film profiles the endurance cyclist who broke the round-the-world record by more than two weeks in 2018, riding more than 18,000 miles fully self-supported in just under 124 days. Her story is all the more impressive given that she was in her mid-30s before she started endurance cycling.
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