Outdoor adventure film festival puts Atlantic Canadians in the spotlight

For the first time, a film festival about outdoor adventures is dedicated entirely to films made by Atlantic Canadians.

The Night of Adventure Film Festival is being held at the Halifax Central Library on April 30 from 7-10 p.m. 

Dave Greene, who lives in Musquodoboit Harbour, N.S., is the founder of Night of Adventure, which is a podcast and speaker series.

To organize the festival, Greene collaborated with A for Adventure, a Dartmouth-based organization that encourages Canadians to engage in outdoor activities.  

Greene said he is excited about the event. 

"When you bring together these amazing types of people into one common space, it just creates the opportunity for magic," he said. 

Greene said he's had the idea for a festival for nearly a decade.

"I love hearing these stories and I love meeting these types of people that have the ambition to step outside of their comfort zone and try something new and push their limits and see what they're fully capable of," he said. 

There are festivals that use a similar model, like the popular Banff Mountain Film Festival that comes to Halifax every year. But Greene said he wanted to showcase the work of Atlantic Canadians. 

"We know there's a market," he said. "We know people want content like this. So we thought to do it ourselves."

Lee Fraser is the owner of the outdoor adventure company, Live Life in Tents, which is based in Margaree, N.S. His documentary, Strawberry Run, is premiering at the festival. 

The documentary follows a group of paddlers on a four-day kayak, canoe and standup paddle board trip in the Margaree River. 

"It's going back to a childhood idea of paddling the Margaree River and then finding people that I've met along the way," he said. "They're interested in coming along for the adventure and documenting it."

The crew covered about 70 kilometres last June. The journey includes whitewater rapids and drops in the upper river.

"I'm fired up to have something like this come out of the East Coast that's more grassroots, because generally everything in relation to this is West Coast-based," Fraser said.

"And having something that's unique to the East Coast to showcase stuff here is great. So I'm pretty excited for it."

Greene said the filmmakers, producers and subjects of the films are inspiring.  

"It's just a fantastic team.… These people are the most humble people and you would never know that the person sitting next to you at work had ridden their bicycle across Canada or paddled some remote river in northern Canada or taken on some ambitious project," he said.

The Night of Adventure Film Festival is sold out, but Greene plans for it to be hosted annually and to build an application process for future years.