For the past 18 years, Sheffield Adventure Film Festival (ShAFF) has been bringing inspirational tales of adventure, travel and overcoming the odds to big screens in the heart of the Outdoor City. Ahead of its return next month, Anna Paxton, previously a volunteer and now co-director of the festival, spoke to ShAFF founder Matt Heason about the past, present and future of the event.
How did Sheffield Adventure Film Festival begin?
I’d been up to the Kendal Mountain Festival and enjoyed the films up there. I got in touch with the directors of the festival and asked how we could watch films like that in Sheffield, so started renting films to show down here. We did some film nights at the Showroom Cinema, the largest independent cinema outside of London, which was really popular. Within the space of about a year the chief exec of the Showroom got in touch. He saw the opportunity for there to be a festival here in Sheffield, and asked if I wanted to work together to start it. Within two or three years we went from renting films from other festivals to getting submissions, so that we were able to plow our own furrow. We now receive hundreds of submissions each year from filmmakers around the world.
Over 18 years you must have watched close to 10,000 adventure films. How has adventure storytelling changed in that time?
The biggest change is in the production values rather than the storytelling, but production values can carry a story. You can shoot a film on an iPhone now and it’s pretty much high definition, with pretty good sound. In terms of storytelling, there are more short films these days; I guess because sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, TikTok are clamoring for that market. Two or three years ago that was short films at 2 to 3 minutes, but now YouTube’s model in particular seems to encourage people to put 16 to 20 minute films out. We’ve gone from long to short to medium.
Some of the big production houses and big distributors have cottoned onto the fact that the right story is big business. There are incredible adventure stories out there for rescues, expeditions and feats. Streaming platforms like National Geographic, Amazon prime, Netflix and Disney have realised that these stories in the right hands can be told really well and have a wider appeal. If you’d said years ago that they were going to make a film about a cave rescue in Thailand [The Rescue] and it’s going to make millions of pounds in box office revenue, you’d have been laughed out of the room. That’s the message I really try to get across: the majority of people in Sheffield aren’t going to be climbers, runners, bikers or extreme outdoors people, but these stories are actually of interest to everybody.
Image from the film Clean Mountains
Cinema is competing with a lot of online content these days. What do you think that festival curation and watching films in person with an audience brings that watching online can’t?
It’s really hard to compete with a feature film because it’s an hour and a half long and there’s no curation involved in that. That’s just down to marketing clout. The curation in a festival comes more through the short films; we watch films all year round and then regroup them into sessions which we think work together. At ShAFF, we pull together themed sessions normally about an hour and a half long, so it’s just an experiential thing that you learn along the way. It’s knowing what sort of films to start a session with and what sort of films to end it with.
What are you looking forward to most at the festival this year?
I’m looking forward to seeing a good crowd of people. The festival was going in the right direction – in 2020, ticket sales were amazing – the program was all lined up, everything was sorted and then the dreaded covid hit and we were scuppered. I thought we dealt with it well – the community was really good, they supported us through it. I’m hoping that we get a decent crowd, a decent vibe and something like back to where we were in 2020.
What do you see in the future for the festival?
It’s a hard question. If you’d asked me a year ago I would have said I’m sure we’re going to go hybrid and half-online but I’ve changed my mind about that. The numbers suggest otherwise and that people are still enjoying the actual cinema.
Made In Sheffield has been a really strong category; in fact, we’ve doubled up to two sessions for the first time this year. We’ve got the whole Made In Sheffield Climb Films screening so it would be nice to think that ShAFF is instrumental in helping push forward that agenda and take it even further. We’ve got a relationship with Sheffield Hallam University and their film course. If the film course could start attracting adventure filmmakers from around the country to come to Sheffield to study and submit their films to ShAFF, that would be a nice story.
Find tickets and the full programme online here.
