Sofia, Jan 28 (BTA/GNA) – Six adventure films, including two Bulgarian productions, will be included in this year’s “Days of Challenges” film festival at Lumiere Cinema in Sofia, the organizers reported. The event will take place on February 1 and 2 in Sofia.
The film Passion 4 Peaks will present two Bulgarian athletes – runner Petar Ivanov and mountain biker Tsvetan Ivanov, who climbed the highest peaks of four Bulgarian mountains in less than 24 hours. Electric Avenue will showcase climbers Viktor Varoshkin and Emiliyan Kolevski, who set a new route at 4,000m altitude, below Mont Blanc.
French mountain guide Thierry Renault will speak the event. Since the 1980s, he has covered every type of free and ice climbing.
Guillaume Pierrel, another alumnus of the Chamonix school, is still in the early stages of his career, which is focused on extreme skiing. Pierrel will give a presentation, followed by the short documentary O’Parizad, which features him.
Topics such as huts, mountain safety and key conservation causes will be raised at the festival.
The Bulgarian Society for the Protection of Birds will present its project to purchase land in Sakar Mountain, Southeast Bulgaria, where several species threatened by farming activities can be conserved. Those include the European ground squirrel, the eastern imperial eagle, and the falcon.
Another environmental initiative to be announced at the forum is the preservation of centenarian trees – a project, popularized by the 2021 Bike and Run for Chepan competition. This year’s edition of Bike and Run, on April 29, will focus on the mapping of centenarian trees through a dedicated smartphone app.
The festival will pay tribute to Bulgarian zoologist and mountaineer Boyan Petrov, who would have turned 50 in early February. Petrov managed to climb 10 out of the 14 eight-thousanders in the world, despite being a diabetic and a cancer survivor. He went missing in the Himalayas on May 3, 2018.
BTA/GNA