Adrenaline highs from the high stool

UP, UP AND AWAY A screen shot from ‘The Birdman of the Karakoram’.

A new film club, the Adventure Film Club, has started in Castlebar. Since March, the film club has been screening adventure-sport documentaries at 8pm on the second Wednesday of every month. The film screenings are free, and take place in the cozy setting of Bridge Street Bar in Castlebar.
The film night is an offshoot of the hugely successful Irish Adventure Film Festival, which took place in Westport for the first time in February.
Graham Clarke, the festival organiser, explains the club offers moviegoers the chance to see some of the great films that were submitted to the festival but didn’t make the final cut. “One of the frustrating things about running the Irish Adventure Film Festival is that we don’t get to screen many films that we would like to. Often simply because we don’t have the screen time. One-hundred-and-twenty-six were submitted this year from 30-plus countries!” he explains. “To help fix that and to share more of the films that have inspired us, I started a monthly Adventure Film Club, to celebrate the films we weren’t able to screen as part of the festival.”
Previous screenings have included ‘The Birdman of the Karakoram’, which follows a paraglider and cameraman as they glide across some of the highest mountains in one of the world’s most extreme, yet stunning, environments, and ‘The Nahanni Whisperer’, which follows four young climbers who dream of climbing the Lotus Flower Tower, a legendary big wall in the furthest outreaches of Northern Canada.

Admission is free, though space is limited. People can find out more about the Adventure Film Club at www.facebook.com/irishadventurefilmfestival or www.irishadventurefilmfestival.com.