The Banff Mountain Film Festival, which comes to East Lansing Thursday at the Business College Complex, is an international tour featuring a variety of outdoor-related films.

The MSU Outdoors Club hosts the East Lansing version of the festival. Moosejaw is one of the local sponsors for the festival, and is selling tickets for $15. Tickets also can be purchased at the door, which opens at 7 p.m.

Comparative culture and politics senior Megan Cross, a coordinator for the East Lansing festival, said the event is something the outdoor community has enjoyed in past years.

“We’ve had the same people coming back year after year,” she said.
Cross noted the event isn’t just for people who are involved in the outdoors. A lot of people that come aren’t into the outdoors or the environment,” she said. “They’re just into films.”

According to biosystems engineering senior Elyse Kutsche, president of the MSU Outdoors Club, seven films will be shown at the event. The MSU Outdoors Club selects the films that will be shown at the festival out of a pool of 24 films.

“We try to spread out the topics of the films,” Kutsche said. “We’ll have one film on mountain biking, one on skiing and one on rock climbing. We try to get a wide variety of films that people would be interested in.”

Oates said the event is a hit in East Lansing because the city is a hub for outdoor-related activities.

“We can get excited about a big event like Banff and then go out and actually do some of that cool stuff ourselves,” he said.

According to Oates, East Lansing is located near a lot of areas central to the outdoor-activities scene in Michigan. Oates participates in climbing and backpacking.

“In two hours, you can be on Lake Huron or Lake Michigan,” he said. “They’ve got the Ledges in Grand Ledge (Mich.). It’s the only outdoor climbing in all of southern Michigan. It’s the center of a whole spokes system of activities — the beauty of living in Michigan.”