Kendal Mountain Festival took place over the weekend. Photo: Bob Smith/grough
A movie documenting the life of a man living remotely in the Scottish Highlands scooped the grand prize at this year’s film awards at Kendal Mountain Festival.
Lizzie MacKenzie’s The Hermit of Treig, shot over four decades, chronicles Ken Smith’s existence living alone in a log cabin near Loch Treig.
Two authors shared top prize in the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature, announced during the festival, with Brian Hall and Helen Mort taking the honours.
And a new award, Nature Chronicles Prize, went to Nicola Pitchford.
The festival took place over four days town over the weekend.
The winners of the 2022 Danner and Rab Kendal Mountain Film Festival Awards were revealed before a live audience who flocked in their thousands to the Cumbrian town for the 42nd staging of the event.
The international film competition, described as the Oscars of mountain film, aims to show the best in outdoor film across 12 categories, including prizes for genre and creative excellence.
Helen Mort at the awards ceremony. Photo: Bob Smith/grough
MacKenzie’s film is a humorous telling of the relationship of Ken Smith, now in his 70s, with the wilderness, living without electricity or running water.
Lizzie MacKenzie said: “If you love the land, it loves you back, and that’s the spirit that is palpable at Kendal Mountain Film Fest. If you love the land, you want to protect it, and that’s really what we were hoping to inspire with this film: an awe and wonder for the world around us, and a desire to protect and respect it.
“On behalf of the whole film team and Ken himself, it is such an honour to receive this award and be part of the Kendal Mountain Festival family.”
The Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature is awarded annually to the author or authors of the best literary work, whether fiction, non-fiction, drama or poetry, the central theme of which is concerned with the mountain environment.
It is named in honour of Pete Boardman and Joe Tasker, who died on Everest in 1982.
Brian Hall shared the award. Photo: Bob Smith/grough
The 2022 winners of the award were High Risk by Brian Hall and A Line Above the Sky by Helen Mort.
Hall’s book details the radical climbers of the late 1970s in the Himalaya, during the golden age of UK mountaineering.
Mort’s work examines the risks and terrors of motherhood and a life in the mountains.
The Nature Chronicles Prize is a new nature writing award, a global biennial competition. Created in memory of Prudence Scott, a lifelong nature diarist who died in 2019, the award aims to ‘find engaging and unique essay-length works which share a commitment to truth telling and respond to the time we are in and the world as it is’. The winner this year was Nicola Pitchford with her essay A Parable of Arable Land.
