Rab’s adventures on film at Love Trails Festival
- Text by Roxana Diba
Adventure Film Night — Taking place between July 2-6, Rab are screening six documentaries at the festival that explore the remarkable world of the adventure sport community.
Through bottle-green pine valleys, across limestone ridges, over sandy tracts edging the Bristol Channel, and into the verdant parkland of 14th-century Weobley Castle, Love Trails festival-goers find their stomping ground.
On the Venn diagram of hobbies, Love Trails sits where trail running and music overlap. Between 2 – 6 July 2 – 6, 5,000 people will rally on the Gower Peninsula in South Wales for long days of adventure and longer nights of dancing.
In the 2026 line-up, as well as talks, runs, hikes and live sets, Love Trails will screen a series of short films and documentaries on outdoor sports. Friday night sees the Adventure Film Night, supported by Rab, where the technical clothing specialists will screen seven films across fell running to ice climbing, ascending Japanese mountain ranges to Berlin’s urban sprawl. There will also be exclusive athlete intros, panel discussions with filmmakers and mountaineers, prizes and giveaways, and a happy hour.
Rab’s films capture the athletes who participate in the unconventional, spotlighting the resilience of these small and highly dedicated communities that push sporting boundaries and seek out the undiscovered. Here’s what to expect.
Winner Gets Cake
Fell running, a sport easily summed up by its sacred maxim “brakes off, brains off”, is not for the faint of heart. Winner Gets Cake, produced in partnership with TCO, spotlights the athletes who find joy, freedom, and broken bones in the merciless hills of the Yorkshire Dales and the Lake District. The short film centres around the ongoing rivalry between Ilkley’s Ben Rothery and Chesterfield’s Finlay Grant as they furiously race up and down rocky scree and grassy moors in Kettlewell, Borrowdale and Kilnsey Crag, while zooming in on the other hardcore competitors that make up the esoteric and cake-laden fell running scene.
Read next: The wild, gruelling beauty of fell running
Running High: Noor’s FKT on the Pyrenean Haute Route
The Pyrenean Haute Route, a wild, raw track stretching 731km (454 miles), takes the average hiker 40 days to finish. Dutch ultrarunner Noor van der Veen quartered that time – completing the gruelling journey in just 10 days, 11 hours and 38 minutes, the fastest known time in history. Running High follows van der Veen from km 0, dipping her finger in the Atlantic to stepping, drenched in celebratory champagne, into the Mediterranean Sea after running 85km (53 miles) a day and sleeping 3 hours a night, while zooming out to the cattle-spotted mountain-sides, dramatic ridgelines, grassy banks and wildflower fields of the Pyrenees.
Here and There
Outdoor climbers are usually found gripping gritstone, granite, and limestone rock faces. In Here and There, British climber Tom Randall, one half of crack climbing wizards Wide Boyz, takes calloused, chalky fingers to the underside of bridges and the steep flanks of houses and church buildings in Berlin. The film catapults from rugged Peak District crags to concrete, graffiti-ed environs as Randall seeks out the unexplored – combining the challenge, curiosity and camaraderie of traditional climbing with the adventure of uncharted urban terrains.
Zelzin, footsteps that inspire
The Iztaccíhuatl volcano, Nahuatl for “White woman”, in reference to its resemblance to a sleeping women’s profile and snow-capped, toothy ridges, sits 60km (37 miles) northwest of Mexico City, the hometown of thru-hiker Zelzin Aketzalli, the first person from Mexico to complete the Triple Crown of Hiking. The film documents Aketzalli as she returns to the mountain that shaped her, revealing the challenges of being a pioneer while showcasing the imposing silhouettes of Izta-Popo Zoquiapan National Park. “To be a thru-hiker is to be human. And to be connected with nature. And to live in harmony with it,” Aketzalli says. “Not to survive. To live with her.”
La Rubia
“Doing something lightly doesn’t feel me,” says 32-year-old Canadian climber Bronwyn Hodgins. In La Rubia, Hodgins attempts a rest period from the adventurous big walls and remote first ascents she’s used to, and instead pursues a two-year project into the technical, high-performance world of sport climbing. The all-female production shows her training, trying and ultimately sending, the intensely physically demanding route La Rubia 5.14c (8c+) in southern Spain, documenting at once the obsessive mind of a climber and the steadfast support of female friendships.
Ephemeral
Dubbed the ‘weird cousin’ of alpine sport, ice climbing is characterised by its hazardous, incomprehensible and constantly shifting terrain. In Ephemeral, as the ice climbing season shrinks year-on-year, ice and mixed climber Jeff Mercier is followed as he ascends Iceland’s glacial landscape. Axes in hand, crampons in feet, Mercier faces the unforgiving slabs of aqua-blue ice, praising the infinitely-variable sport, where the route can change year to year, season to season and day to day.
In the Footsteps of Banryu
The monk Banryu, the ‘father of Japanese alpinism’, was the first to walk to the peak of Mt. Yarigatake and the perilous Daikiretto ridge that connects it to Mt. Hotaka-dake. The film In the Footsteps of Banryu sees a team of English and Japanese athletes set out to trace his route, running 60km (37 miles), covering 3,800 vertical metres and setting the fastest-known-time on Mt Yake-dake – an active volcano where thin ripples of steam escape out of volcanic rubble. Shot over five days, the short film captures the wide, craggy landscape of Japan’s Northern Alps and the soul-enriching joys of nature.
For more information on Love Trails Festival and the Adventure Film Night, supported by Rab, visit the festival’s official website. For updates on Rab athletes and upcoming events, follow Rab UK on Instagram.
Roxana Diba is a freelance journalist. Follow her on Instagram.
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