by Ali Thomas and Henry Iddon Joe Brown For the second time running the Llanberis Mountain Film Festival had to compete with blue skies and snowy hills; yet while the conditions tempted many into the hills, there were still plenty of visitors enjoying a packed programme of new and archive films and an all star line-up of speakers For the first time, the festival held a film competition, which attracted entries from Canada, Poland, Spain and the US as well as plenty of home-grown talent.The moving Whiteout by Poland?s Wojciech Szumowski won the best film award and the environmental Gainekira by Pembrokeshire?s Dave Welton won best newcomer.Locally based climber Paul Higginson won the short film award for his locally filmedTread on Slate.The festival hosted many other premiere screenings, including The Story of Indian Face by local filmmaker Alun Hughes, Paddling on a Promise by kayaker Simon Osborne, and John Redhead?s latest offering Soft Explosive Hard Embrace. Yet for many, the festival highlight had to be a gentle Sunday afternoon on the sofa with Llanberis? regal Joe Brown (see photo) and his cronies from the legendary ?Rock and Ice? club. An enthralled audience listened to amusing tales from Joe and other members of the club, including Joe ?Morty? Smith, Dennis Gray, Ray Greenall, Don Roscoe and Doug Verity, about their first ascents of routes such as White Slab on Cloggy and Hangover on Clogwyn y Grochan . The MC was Jim Perrin.Meanwhile, the LLAMFF fringe had an interesting line-up; Tim Emmett base-jumped (see photo) into the fields next to Llyn Padarn off a tandem paraglider and Leo Houlding (see photo) amazed local youngsters slacklining in the Big Top tent.
