Jackson, Wyoming – January 21, 2008 – Sliding Liberia, the film that made its world debut on January 18 and won that night’s People’s Choice Award, was chosen the Grand Prize winner of the 2008 Alpinist Film Festival. The audience selected the recipient on January 20 at the first annual People’s Choice Ceremonies, a fourth and final night that showcased the “best of” Snow, Surf and Stone nights.
Let It Ride: The Craig Kelly Story and Diamonds are Forever, the other People’s Choice Award winners, were presented with Sliding Liberia for the final night of the 2008 Festival at the Center for the Arts in downtown Jackson, Wyoming. Sliding won the audience’s Grand Prize vote by a narrow margin.
“The People’s Choice Ceremonies were a resounding success,” said AFF director Christian Beckwith. “In addition to hosting the Festival’s finest films in a single event, the fourth night allowed the community to get involved with the Grand Prize selection process at the climax of the Festival.”
Sliding Liberia is a surf film/social documentary that follows a group of young surfers to Liberia in search of more than perfect waves. As they travel through the West African country, devastated by decades of brutal civil war, they record the stories of people they meet along the way–people like Alfred, a young boy who became Liberia’s first surfer after finding a bodyboard while fleeing from rebels. Besides rediscovering a world-class point break that could be the best-kept secret in the surfing world, the surfers find something much more important–a way to travel responsibly in the 21st century.
“It’s fitting that a film about bringing communities together in one of the places of our inspiration would win this year’s Grand Prize,” Beckwith said. “That sentiment is the foundation of the Festival itself.”
Courtesy of Patagonia, the filmmakers of Sliding Liberia will receive Patagonia gift certificates worth $2,250. The filmmakers of the other two People’s Choice Award winners, Diamonds and Let It Ride, each will receive a $750 gift certificate from Patagonia.
About The Alpinist Film Festival
The Alpinist Film Festival celebrates the adventure lifestyle across disciplines and generations with three nights of film in skiing, surfing and climbing. The Festival’s mission is to advance the art of cinematographic storytelling as it underscores the unity among the adventure lifestyle communities. A portion of every year’s proceeds are donated to charities that help preserve the places of our inspiration. Because one of these places is our planet, beginning in 2008, the Festival will purchase carbon offsets to counteract its carbon footprint.
About Alpinist Magazine
Hailed by Italian climbing legend Reinhold Messner as “The best climbing magazine in the world today,” Alpinist Magazine is an archival-quality, quarterly publication dedicated to world alpinism and adventure climbing. The pages of Alpinist capture the art of ascent in its most powerful manifestations, presenting an articulation of climbing and its lifestyle that matches the intensity of the pursuit itself. Alpinist has been awarded three Maggie Awards, for Best Quarterly/Consumer Division, Best Overall Design, and Best Electronic Newsletter, and was featured in a seven-page article in Outside Magazine (“The Purists”) in March 2005. The magazine’s editorial and publishing offices are based in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and online at www.alpinist.com.