Get your heart beating at Banff Film Festival

Some creatures were made to soar. Others struggle to mimic that talent.

The Banff Mountain Film Festival is a spectacular celebration of the latter — a collection of eye-popping short movies about outdoor adventurers, explorers and daredevils who run, climb, cycle, kayak, ski, swim and even fly about some in of the most astoundingly scenic sites on Earth.

The annual traveling festival, launched every winter from the Canadian resort town of Banff, Alberta, is back at the Kiggins Theatre this weekend for a two-day run, featuring two different programs of movies, most between five and 15 minutes long, that whisk viewers to peaks, canyons, deserts, rivers, glaciers and caverns.

While a few of these films can’t be honestly classified as anything other than visually stunning “ski porn,” spokesman Phillip Bridgers said, many are deep studies of driven people who undertake challenges that are equal parts beauty, exhilaration, danger and pain.

“Why the ?!?! am I doing this?” is what the solitary hero of “The Frozen Road” demands of himself as he’s pushing his bicycle across Canadian tundra toward the Arctic Sea. Another film, about kayakers who launch themselves over massive waterfalls in Iceland, is simply called “Why?”

“Why do we throw ourselves down waterfalls?” its narrator asks.

It’s obvious why some of these adventurers can’t resist: they’re proving that imperfect bodies can achieve great things. The hero of “Ascend” is a mountain bicyclist who lost a leg to cancer; the hero of “Stumped” is a mountain climber born without a lower left arm; the hero of “Edges” is a 90-year-old professional ice skater who fights her way back to the rink after a car accident.

But many more Banff films follow able-bodied strivers at the peak of their game — such as “Into Twin Galaxies: A Greenland Epic,” which follows three National Geographic “Adventurers of the Year” on a ski-kiting and kayaking journey to the northernmost river ever paddled.

The festival even includes one piece about creatures who were definitely designed to fly: “Sky Migrations” is a 16-minute film about raptors that migrate all the way from Alaska to the Southern Hemisphere, and the conservation scientists and volunteers who love them. The film takes us to mountaintops in Nevada and New Mexico and brings us face-to-face, literally, with golden eagles.

Why? Because when you travel to wild places and undertake exhilarating things, the narrator of “Why?” says, you release something wild and exhilarating inside yourself.

‘A bit crazy’

This may sound like nothing but thrills, chills and scenery. But anybody with a conscience has to wonder, when is a seeming thrill-seeker actually a suicide in the making?

The title “Safety Third” says it all: it’s a 29-minute feature about “free solo” rock climber Brad Gobright, who makes like a mountain goat without any ropes, harnesses or protective equipment at all — and who has broken numerous bones, including his back. Has that stopped him? Don’t even think about it. “Soloists are a bit crazy and it is only a matter of time until we read about their death,” commented one viewer at an earlier Banff screening.

And, a unique group of aerial acrobats called The Flying Frenchies are back this year with their latest defiance of gravity, a three-minute blast called “Surf The Line.” It watches them literally surf the sky, via zipline, high over a mountain range in southern France.

The Flying Frenchies appear to be mimicking those raptors, but some ambitions just don’t fly. In 2016, one of the Frenchies fell and died while preparing a hot air balloon stunt. The man who died was featured in last year’s Flying Frenchies contribution to the Banff festival — an unforgettable film called “Metronomic,” featuring rock musicians jamming while soaring about on wires over a rocky canyon. A voice-over in that film keeps punctuating the action with cries of “Are you crazy?”

Visit the Banff Mountain Film Festival and decide for yourself.