Thank you by Michael Dillon, IAMF Grand Prize 2022
The International Alliance for Mountain Film needs to be thanked, and I feel qualified to do so, as I have been involved as a filmmaker and audience member in Mountain and Adventure film Festivals for 45 years now. And as I’ve had 45 years of benefit from it, I have maybe the most number of reasons to thank you.
We all thank you for the huge amount of work that goes into each festival, and we realise we’re only aware of probably just one per cent of all the work that you and your teams actually do.
And you in turn probably only get to hear one per cent of all the wonderful feedback from all who come to your Festivals. Only get to hear perhaps one per cent of hundreds of thousands of stories about the impact of your festivals. Stories like one of mine, that I am sharing today for the first time, the story of a chain of events that started with me going to Trento in the 1980s and seeing a film called Kanchenjunga. That film influenced me a lot. In this film the climbers didn’t reach the summit, and yet the journey and the personalities of the climbers was covered so well that it even won the Grand Prize that year.
That film, in that Trento Festival, taught me that it didn’t matter if the climbers didn’t reach their goal. You could still make a wonderful film regardless. And that gave me courage to make a film of an attempt to climb Everest from Sea level, and to try to do it well enough that it would work as a film even if the climber didn’t succeed, which was quite likely, because it’s not easy to climb the entire height of Everest from sea level. And so we did the expedition, and the film of it, Everest Sea to Summit, was chosen for Poprad’s first Mountain Film Festival in 1993. And in the audience watching it was a young man who told me, just last year, that seeing that film inspired him to become an Adventure Filmmaker. That man, Pavol Barabas has since made many wonderful films that in turn have inspired countless others, all thanks to these Festivals.
Mine is just one of countless stories on the impact of your festivals. Stories of people who have been inspired to become adventure filmmakers, or better and bolder adventure filmmakers. Audiences, who, through these Festival films, get to go on wonderful adventures and often get inspired to do their own adventures both large and small, inspired to change to a healthier lifestyle, or get involved in conservation issues, and on and on the impact of what you do reveals itself in countless ways, 99 per cent of which you never get to hear about.
And so all of us thank you and your wonderful teams, and all the Directors and teams that came before you.
Thank you all.
Michael Dillon
Trento, May 2nd 2025