Film festival designed for adrenaline junkies

Danger and adrenaline will take centre stage when Ireland’s only Adventure Film Festival comes to Galway City’s Town Hall Theatre and the Loft on Bridge Street on October 1 and 2.

The Adventure Film Festival will host films from more than 20 countries and a talk from acclaimed British rock-climber, Leo Houlding, regarded as one of the best climbers ever.

At the age of 18, Houlding became the first to free-climb the mammoth El Capitan cliff face in the Yosemite Valley, and since then he has accumulated more than 20 years’ extreme adventure experience.

His travels have taken him from Top Gear to the top of Everest, from devastating injury to major world firsts and from terrifying cliff jumps to glorious summits of the most remote and difficult peaks on every continent. In 2014 Leo fronted a major Discovery TV adventure series, Lost Worlds.

The following year, he led a successful expedition to a cliff in Arctic Greenland known as the Mirror Wall. This was his first major expedition since becoming a father and the loss of his great friend and partner Sean ‘Stanley” Leary.

The expedition became the subject of a film, Mirror on the Wall and is also the basis for the Mirror Wall talk that Leo Houlding will present at the Town Hall on Saturday, October, 1, from 3.30pm to 5.30pm.

This is his first time to deliver the lecture in Ireland.

In addition to the talk, the Festival will host a total of five film sessions. These sessions are broken into four main themes, which focus on adrenaline, adventure, water sports, environment and culture and the Best of session.

Films to be screened include Degrees North, Young Guns, Chasing Niagara and Reflections of an Underwater Cameraman. Operation Moffat, meanwhile, will chart the colourful climbing life of Britain’s first female mountain guide Gwen Moffat.

■ Tickets start at €5 and full details on films and events are available at whynotadventure filmfestival.com