National Geographic ADVENTURE

The Best New Surf Movie Not About Surfing

Text by Assistant Editor Ryan Bradley
Photograph courtesy Magnolia Pictures

Surfwise is not a documentary film about surfing. For this reason, it’s the best movie about surfing to come out in a good long while. Confused? Fair enough. Let me try to explain.

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Banff's Radical Reels Reigns on YouTube

With its 2008 incarnation now touring theaters around the globe, the Banff Mountain Film Festival is generating a web buzz as well.

Users on our favorite guilty pleasure video sharing site, YouTube, voted last year's trailer promoting the festival's Radical Reels category one of the best sports videos. With almost 26,000 views, 2007 Radical Reels video is a dramatic montage of outdoor action sports featuring athletes in some of the most extreme conditions imaginable--underground ice cave climbing and downhill mountain unicycling to name a few. But there's substance, too: The trailer also shows snippets from some of the festival’s longer, more thought-provoking films to counterbalance the archetypical footage of daredevils' antics that we love to watch.

Still undiscovered by the YouTube audience (for now, at least), the 2008 Radicals Reels trailer (which we embedded above) is definitely worth a watch. This year's films can be viewed in their entirety during the Radical Reels tour, hitting 13 states and four Canadian provinces this year.

--Lucas Pollock

Psyching Up: Adventure Therapy on Film

The mountain is high, the ocean is wide, and that which does not kill us makes us stronger—at least according to Nietzsche, and to a spate of newly released documentaries that put this premise to the test.

Everest: A Climb for Peace contrives to solve geopolitics through mountaineering as Israelis and Palestinians scale the peak together ($20). While bonding proves inevitable, the film’s most honest moment comes when Israeli alpinist Micha Yaniv admits: "I’m basically just here to climb."

Mountaintop enlightenment makes for compelling drama in Blindsight (in theaters in April). Erik Weihenmayer—the first sightless man to summit Everest—leads six blind Tibetan teenagers and their teacher up Everest’s neighbor, 23,114-foot Lhakpa Ri, to show the world what they’re made of. The teacher (also blind) frets for their safety, and Weihenmayer urges them onward, while the kids are caught in the middle, in the dark, and on high.

An equally tense ordeal plays out in Deep Water—one of the best documentaries of 2007 ($16). In 1968 Donald Crowhurst entered the first nonstop, solo around-the-world sailing race despite an utter lack of experience; the film traces his quixotic voyage and his descent into madness at sea.

Do you have an all-time favorite adventure therapy flick? Let us know.

Photograph courtesy Robson Entertainment