BANFF Mountain Film Festival World Tour

The BANFF Mountain Film Festival World Tour Italia 2026 arrives in Italy and in Italian-speaking Switzerland with its 14th edition, bringing to the big screen a selection of the best award-winning and finalist films from the BANFF Mountain Film Festival in Canada, the leading international event dedicated to mountain, adventure, and outdoor sports cinema.

From February 3 to March 20, 2026, the tour will travel through 42 cities, from the Alps to Sicily, combining film screenings, meetings, and special guests. The tour will open in Milan at Teatro Carcano.

The 2026 edition takes place at a particularly meaningful moment: the Canadian BANFF Festival has recently celebrated 50 years of history, half a century of stories that have helped shape and spread an authentic, mindful mountain culture in constant dialogue with the present. From this legacy the World Tour was born, bringing the Festival’s films around the world since 1981 and to Italy since 2013.

The films offer a contemporary perspective on adventure, understood not only as athletic achievement but as an experience of choice, relationship, and vision. At the core is the relationship between humans and the mountain environment, the ability to read landscapes and move through them with awareness.

The central theme of the 2026 edition is the “line”: in outdoor sports, the ideal passage imagined before it is traced. In the BANFF program, the line takes many forms—from ski tracks on remote slopes to fragile paths on changing ice, chosen routes on great walls, journeys into unexplored territories, or marks that connect past and present. Stories range from extreme skiing to alpinism, ice climbing, whitewater kayaking, mountain biking, and exploration, crossing places such as Japan, Iceland, Nepal, Gabon, the Rocky Mountains, and the Mont Blanc massif.

The narratives go beyond sports performance, addressing broader and timely issues such as environmental change, risk, memory of places, and individual and collective responsibility toward fragile landscapes. These films speak both to athletes and to a wider audience that sees the mountains as a space of inspiration, limits, and discovery.

The BANFF Mountain Film Festival World Tour Italia is therefore much more than a film festival: it is a collective experience that builds, stop after stop, a community of enthusiasts, mountain professionals, and curious viewers, where cinema becomes an opportunity for exchange, dialogue, and inspiration.

Many tour stops will feature special guests, including athletes, directors, and protagonists of the films, such as Jeff Mercier (Ephemeral) in Milan and David Arnaud, director of Gabon Uncharted, in Turin.

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