The Adventure Travel Film Festival

Lois Pryce explains how her own unique adventures led her and her husband to create the Adventure Travel Film Festival.

All my adventures have begun at Stanfords. The map-buying trip to Covent Garden is something of a ritual in the planning stages of an expedition, so there was a satisfying sense of coming full circle when I dropped off some brochures for The Adventure Travel Film Festival at the store the other day, and spotted the spine of my first book on the shelves.

Back in 2003 I was working at the BBC in West London, and like many twenty-somethings, dreamed of escaping the office for a life of adventure. I had just passed my motorcycle test and the combination of newly-acquired licence and a 9-5 job turned out to be an explosive combination. I bought a small dirt bike, shipped it to Alaska and spent the next 10 months riding it 20,000 miles to the tip of South America.

A few years later, despite my friends and family thinking this would have cured my itchy feet, I made another solo ride, this time the length of Africa, from my home in London to Cape Town, taking in the Sahara in Algeria and Niger, the Congo and Angola. I wrote a couple of books about these trips but as anyone reading this will no doubt understand, the itch never really gets scratched and in 2013 I set off again, this time on a solo motorcycle tour around Iran, which is the subject of my next book.

Still from the film Arctic Air (2002)

Somewhere along the way, between trips, I got married to fellow motorcycle traveller and adventure film-maker, Austin Vince. Austin had made the cult 90s TV show, Mondo Enduro, about his round the world motorcycle expedition that became the inspiration for Ewan MacGregor’s Long Way Round. This had led to him receiving a regular supply of intriguing DVDs in the post from friends, acquaintances and total strangers – from all over the world. These were films that people had made of their adventures, often staggeringly impressive feats and a professional quality of film-making. The digital revolution was well under way and suddenly people could make broadcast quality films of their trips and edit themselves on a laptop. The results were amazing but they were always accompanied by the same story – the TV channels weren’t interested in showing anything unless it involved a celebrity. It was while we were sitting around at home one evening, watching yet another superbly-executed jaw-dropping adventure film that we came up with the idea – ‘We should start a film festival!’

From Gold of Bengal (2014)

And so, the following summer, we found ourselves sitting in a field in Devon with a few hundred like-minded souls in front of a giant screen showing a weekend’s worth of amazing adventure travel films that spanned 80 years, every part of the globe and every form of transport. It was a small but raging success and over the last five years the festival has grown, moved to bigger and better venues and now, in our fifth year we are excited to be bringing the festival to London.

The purpose of The Adventure Travel Film Festival was always to showcase great but lesser-known movies and expeditions but there was another important aim – to bring together travellers and adventurers of all kinds in person. Most film festivals are in urban centres, spread across a number of different cinemas and venues, so the audience rarely get to meet each other and hang out. Our plan was to create a film festival with the atmosphere of a music festival, where the party was just as important as the content.

Poster boy and speaker at this year’s festival, the inspirational Andre Brugiroux

The Adventure Travel Film festival has expanded beyond what we could have ever imagined. It has also expanded beyond the celluloid and now includes all sorts of outdoorsy and indoorsy action including bushcraft lessons, foraging walks, film-making and travel-writing workshops, speakers on all kinds of subjects, ‘ask the experts’ panel discussions with world-renowned adventurers and live music. Most importantly it always includes a big bonfire because there’s nothing that adventurey types love more than sitting around a campfire, telling tall tales of derring do… and you definitely can’t do that at your local Odeon.

Now in our 5th year and having sold out the last, we are upping sticks from our Dorset beginnings and moving to the Big Smoke… or just outside it in Mill Hill, NW7. This year’s festival includes our usual crop of incredible independent adventure travel film, but this year we’ve expanded the programme to include expert talks and workshops on human and vehicular powered adventures, introductions to crowdfunding, travel photography, filmmaking and writing and more, including an expert panel on hitch-hiking, this year’s theme, with legendary world traveller Andre Brugiroux.

We hope you’ll come join us to get inspired and share your own adventure stories with us!

Find out more about the festival at their website: http://www.adventuretravelfilmfestival.com/

Visit Lois and Austin on their own websites: loisontheloose.com and austinvince.com

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