Alex Honnold, Tommy Caldwell and Adam Ondra are all legendary names in the climbing world, known for their heroic acts on the most impossible mountain sides. As the 2018 edition of the international Reel Rock Film Tour hits Budapest, documentaries selected for the festival show how these valiant sportsmen and other professional climbers push the boundaries and cheat death. Buckle up and watch arduous ascents before breathtaking backdrops brought to the Budapest Corvin Cinema this November.
Whether you are a climbing fanatic or an armchair alpinist, the Emmy-winning Reel Rock Film Tour is for those whose adrenaline starts pumping just by watching the world’s most dramatic mountainsides being scaled. Taking place at the Corvin Cinema on 15 and 16 November, this annual film festival packs five movies into two 100-minute sessions to bring the best recent climbing documentaries to Budapest audiences once more.
Starting at 7pm, the special Reel Rock 13 selection takes the viewer from Jordan’s desert wilderness to the frozen towers of Antarctica. Among the four films are Queen Maud Land, featuring six elite climbers mounting an expedition to one of the world’s most remote climbing frontiers. The challenging conquest was also joined by free-solo star Alex Honnold, who referred to one pitch as “the scariest I have ever led”.
Also part of this year’s assortment is Age of Ondra, an introduction to a 25-year-old Czech climber as he explores new realms of human potential in the sport. The film follows Adam Ondra from his home in the Czech Republic, across Europe to North America, as he innovates new training methods and attempts to be the first person to send 5.15.d on the first try, the hardest grade in climbing.
Then a vast landscape of sandstone walls is revealed in The Valley of the Moon that breaks down cultural barriers in Jordan’s Wadi Rum. Here, two Israelis team up with a local Bedouin guide to establish a 1,800-foot route, eventually recruiting American climber Madeleine Sorkin to help achieve their dream.
Racing to get to the top the fastest is examined in greater depths in Up to Speed, a movie prompted by the announcement that climbing will be part of the 2020 Olympics, a monumental occasion for the sport. As earning a medal also requires competing in speed climbing, Reel Rock correspondent Zachary Barr embarks on a global journey to discover this seldom practised sub-discipline of the sport.
The 2018 Reel Rock festival reaches its climax with The Dawn Wall, a documentary following a groundbreaking ascent by Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson. The film tells the story of a 19-day climb up El Capitan on a route previously thought to be impossible to scale: the Dawn Wall. Caldwell and Jorgeson cling to slivers of granite so infinitesimal the climbers seem to will them out of the wall. “It’s like stepping off the edge of the Earth,” says Caldwell in the film’s trailer. Still, the movie’s most affecting scene takes place in a setting that isn’t epic or panoramic: inside a cramped shelter, steam pouring from a camping stove into the face of a tired climber.
;t=11s All five films screen with original English audio and Hungarian subtitles. Admission for the series is 4,900 forints. Passes are available from the Corvin Cinema ticket office or online on its website.
