A stirring film about war vets tackling a Himayalan peak, a tale of dogged environmental stewardship unfolding in extremely cold climes, a documentary about mustangs in the West. These were some of the themes of the movies named “best” during Sunday’s closing night at the 8th Boulder International Film Festival. The winners are….
Best “Call 2 Action” feature (and winner, too, of the People’s Choice Award): “High Ground,” about U.S. war vets braving a 20,000 feet and facing the wounds, physical and emotional, of the war.
Best Action Film: “Chasing Ice.” Jeff Orlowski’s Sundance-victorious portrait of James Balog and his Extreme Ice Survey project of tracking the retreat of North American glaciers.
Best Short Documentary: “Incident in New Baghdad.” The Oscar-nominated short offers a profile of former soldier Ethan McCord, whose sense of the war and mission was changed irrevocably by a July 2007 event made infamous in video of a U.S. Apache helicopter attack released by WikiLeaks in 2010.
Best Feature Film: “Monsieur Lazhar.” Despite an aggravating problem common to subtitled films (the white type on light background issue), this Oscar-nominated film about an Algerian refugee who becomes a substitute teacher in a traumatized Montreal elementary school class resonated.
Best Short: “A finger two dots then me.” Poet Derrick Brown’s stirring performance of his titular poem gets luminous treatment by the Holechek Brothers.
Best Documentary: “Wild Horse, Wild Ride” follows a few of the equine and human beneficiaries of a program that puts 100 rounded-up mustangs with 100 trainers, who then compete in the annual Extreme Mustang Makeover Challenge.