It is quite peculiar that a place like the Roaring Fork Valley — which serves as a playground for some of the most extreme sports and world-class athletes, from World Cup ski racing to X Games, intrepid mountain biking terrain to über-technical rock climbing, envied Gold Medal-water fishing and even unparalleled hiking trails — would lack a film festival specifically designed to showcase such talent.

At least that’s the way it seemed to Carbondale’s 5Point Film Festival Founder Julie Kennedy.

True, events like Aspen Filmfest usher in internationally acclaimed films, even including a local’s category, and winter brings with it weekends like The Meeting, highlighting some of the best snowsliding talent around. And then there is the Rocky Mountain Student Film Fest, which gives students across the region a chance to show off their cinematic chops. Yet, still, there hasn’t been a singular event specifically designed to illuminate the multitude of awe-inspiring feats of athleticism that have formed the foundation of this valley.

“‘It’s time.’ That is exactly what I said to myself a year ago when I first dared to imagine this new journey,” says Kennedy. “It is time to make the time in our busy lives and recognize how fortunate we are to have what we have and to live in such a soulful place.”

And thus the 5Point Film Festival was born. Predicated upon five key points – respect, commitment, humility, purpose and balance – the festival has set a mission “to inspire adventure of all kinds, to connect generations through shared experience and respect, to engage passion with a conscience, and to educate through film.”

For its inaugural year, the film fest committee received more than 200 film entries from across the country — ranging in length from five minutes to over an hour and a half — in action sports like skiing, snowboarding, climbing, kayaking, surfing, biking, BASE jumping, skateboarding and fly-fishing. The field was narrowed down to 24 films divided into four programs over the three days of the festival, which began Thursday and runs through Saturday, May 10, in Carbondale.

“From the very beginning, I couldn’t imagine any location other than Carbondale, here in heart of the Roaring Fork Valley, as the perfect showcase for appreciating stunning outdoor beauty, bringing our community together and making positive change in the world,” Kennedy says.

But even with a great idea — and a perfect location — crafting a new a film festival is still a daunting task.

“Because it was our first year, we started out not really knowing how to start the whole process,” says 5Point program director Michele Cardamone. “Soliciting films was very slow at the beginning, because we had no credibility. No one knew who we were, and they didn’t know if it was worth their time to submit.”

So Cardamone and Kennedy hit the pavement running, attending other outdoor action sports film festivals to recruit talent, and taking advantage of Kennedy’s industry connections (her husband Michael previously owned Climbing magazine).

“We slowly put a team together,” says Cardamone, “and filmmakers started responding. But then we really had to look at each film to make sure they went beyond normal sports films, also incorporating the five principles. Because it’s those principles that inform every decision we make.”

And it seems that most of the movies screened, many of which were filmed long before the 5point call for entries — already sought to encompass the five principles of respect, commitment, humility, purpose and balance.

“Chasing Dora,” from Los Angeles-based filmmakers Wes Brown and TJ Barrack, takes on the posthumous challenge of iconoclastic ‘60s surfer Mickey Dora to “bring surfing back to its roots.” The film follows three California surfers around the world as they try to do just that.

“These guys really wanted to take the commercialization out of surfing,” Brown says. “They made boards out of cactus and wood, didn’t have sponsors, no stickers, and surfed in 50-degree water in wool shorts.”

Brown, now 27, has been working on films since he was 18. He has completed 12, and says that while the technical aspects of filming surfing were difficult, fully grasping Dora’s story was the true challenge.

“The hardest part was just trying to tell Mickey’s story,” says Brown. “So many people are so passionate about him and we wanted to get it right. It’s also just a hard topic. Surfing is this soulful act – it’s some people’s religion. But it’s become very commercial, and that’s what kind of runs the system now, the sponsorships, the ads and the photos. But that’s also why it’s grown and become so successful. It’s kind of a Catch-22, and that’s what this film tries to explore.”

“Sliding Liberia” is another surfing flick in the festival, but instead of looking directly at the sport, San Francisco filmmakers Britton Caillouette and Nicholai Lidow used surfing as a lens by which to offer a bit of social commentary. When the two shot the film a few years ago, Lidow was a political science graduate studying, traveling and researching war-torn areas of the world, and Caillouette was a Stanford undergrad with a budding interest in film.

Lidow, a southern California surfer who takes his surfboard with him everywhere he travels, had been in Liberia at the end of the country’s civil war traveling with refugees in search of their lost relatives.

“One day Nicholai had been on the road traveling in Liberia when he came across this beach,” says Caillouette. “Turns out there was this world-class series of waves there. He ended up surfing all day by himself until this young 20-year-old Liberian kid paddles out to him on a boogie board. And so Nicholai asked the kid about his story.”

Turns out the kid, Albert, had found the board sometime during the war, and had taught himself how to ride it. He had never heard of surfing.

“That kid and his story really became the inspiration for our film,” says Caillouette. “When Nicholai returned, he told me about the people he had met and just the horrendous state of the country at the time. So this seemed like the perfect opportunity to create a different type of surf film where surfing became a catalyst for social awareness. We figured we could really use this surf journey to expose people to some harsh realities of what it’s like to live in these places that are considered surfers’ paradise.”

So the duo, along with a handful of pro surfers, returned to Liberia to reconnect with Albert, and to interview local Liberians about their experiences in the civil war and living as exiles in their own country.

“I can’t speak for someone else’s experience, but growing up as a surfer kid, reading surf magazines and watching surf films, you develop a one-sided view of what life is like off the break. But the more you grow up and the more you travel, you realize that for many, many, many people out there, it’s not just “The Endless Summer,” and you realize the importance of bringing a voice to the actual people who live in the places where we find these perfect waves, and involving them in the dialogue of history.

And it’s just this type of dedication to the full story that defines the festival.

“We’re trying to showcase filmmakers who have a depth of understanding of our natural world, and can also show the talent, respect and humility of athletes while paddling the rivers, surfing the waves, climbing the mountains and skiing the steepest of steep couloirs. There also always needs to be a balance between pushing things to their limits yet always being deliberate and thoughtful while making decisions.”

damien@aspendailynews.com