Karin Stubenvoll

In fall 2008, Mountain Culture and Environment welcomed the return of Karin Stubenvoll to the World Tour team. Karin had worked briefly in the Mountain Culture office in 2006 as a World Tour Program Coordinator for the Banff Mountain Film Festival. However, her history with Mountain Culture and the Banff Mountain Film Festival is much deeper and broader than it might appear.

Stubenvoll’s first connection to the World Tour began in France in the late 1990s when she worked as the European tour coordinator with one of the World Tour film projection partners in Europe at the time, Chris McGeough. Apart from assisting with the local presentation of the Banff films in Chamonix, Stubenvoll organized the logistics for all the film screenings in Europe from an office there. The screenings, although smaller in number when compared with the European tour today, had a broad reach from the Ice Hotel in Kiruna, Sweden in the north, to Livigno, Italy in the south, and all the way to Budapest, Hungary in the east.

Back in those days, the films were in NTSC Beta-cam format which caused complications in Europe where projection equipment worked in another format. As a result, all the films were projected on North American equipment that had to be brought and set up at each individual venue. Stubenvoll remembers a particularly frantic screening in Denmark which happened two days after the Film Festival in Banff where tapes were duplicated overnight by Banff Centre producer Woody MacPhail, then flown to Copenhagen with Chris McGeough, where she met him with the projection equipment van ready for a show that night.

Since her return to Mountain Culture in Banff in 2008, Stubenvoll has been working on the World Tour as usual but has been extensively involved with the expansion of the film screenings in Germany. The German tour has grown exponentially from two shows in the late 1990’s to more than 30 Banff Mountain Film Festival and Radical Reels screenings in Germany and Switzerland this year, with more in the works for 2010 and 2011. Part of this success is likely due to Stubenvoll’s long history with Mountain Culture at The Banff Centre and her fluency in three languages, including her native tongue German.

World tour manager Jim Baker says “We’re thrilled to have (her) working with us again. Her in-depth knowledge and world-wide connections are taking the international tour to a new level.”