Birdmen to help bikeboys
A FILM about the heights and frights of paragliding is to be shown at Bridport’s Electric Palace to raise funds for Dorset’s only indoor skate and cycle park.
The Trick Factory on St Michael’s Trading Estate in Bridport has seen countless risky moves tried out, but probably none that can really compare with chucking yourself off the side of the Himalayas with only a nylon wing to hang onto.
The Birdman of the Karakoram will be introduced by West Dorset birdman Eddie Colfox, whom many people will have seen over the years gliding like a buzzard around places like Eggardon Hill. At the end of the screening on March 23, Mr Colfox will also take questions.
The movie focuses on some of the paragliding and film-making exploits of John Silvester and Alun Hughes and other Himalayan paragliding explorers like Mr Colfox, who quotes one reviewer thus:
“Ready yourself to be thrown into the heart of a terrifying world of extreme altitude flying that few humans will ever experience.
“On the razor sharp cutting edge of adventure paragliding, The Birdman of the Karakoram takes you from armchair to the most extreme flying location on earth, when high altitude paragliding pioneer John Silvester takes Alun Hughes on the tandem flight to end all tandem flights.
“Supported by nothing more than a ten kilo nylon wing and John’s uncanny paragliding skills, the pair commit themselves deep into a remote and hypoxic world of snow, ice and previously unexplored terrain, where flying to survive becomes the name of the game.
“The Birdman of the Karakoram demolishes any ideas you may have had about paragliding being about serenely floating around the sky.”
It won the 2009 Best Film on Human Adventure award at St Hilaire, the largest flying film festival.
A clip can be seen by clicking on this link
As well as raising funds for the Trick Factory, the screening should also help the people of Hunza in Pakistan, a tribal area in the High Karakoram.
Mr Colfox says they “have recently had a landslide block off their communication link and also trap 87m of glacial meltwater in a dam which when/ if it breaks will flood their town. Twenty people have already been killed and much farmland has also been lost.”
Tickets cost £10 (£6 concessions) and can be booked by calling 01308-428354 between 9.30am and 4.30pm weekdays. Or you could pop in to the Electric Palace box office in South Street, Bridport.
“The bars will be open throughout!” says Mr Colfox.
And he adds, finally: “If anyone knows anyone who might commission our next adventure, please come or bring them along.”