How Kendal Mountain Festival is aiming high

As chief executive and festival director of Kendal Mountain Festival respectively, their working lives grow increasingly hectic in the build up to the annual adventure film festival which takes place from November 21 to November 24.

“We have a joke in the team here, who are all sporty, athletic people, that everyone's just constantly in training for that weekend,” says Jacqui.

“I remember one year my watch said I had walked something like 28 miles over the three days. It's just relentless. It's an endurance fest. But you're on an incredible high, which is quite an addictive thing in some ways and there's such a sense of pride as you watch it come together.”

With a history stretching back to the 1980s, ‘Kendal’ - as it is commonly known - has become a must-attend event in the calendar of outdoor enthusiasts, film makers, adventurers and anyone who wants to be inspired and awed.

Over the course of the weekend nearly 30,000 individual tickets are sold to film screenings, talks and other events which take place in venues all around the town, with a central hub - the Basecamp - located by the River Kent beside the Abbot Hall gallery.

The weekend also features its own 10k running event around the hills overlooking the town and, for the first time this year, a 50km ultra run.

Events spill out into other areas as well, for example, a literally immersive wild swimming experience at the Windermere Jetty Museum accompanied by music from the Scottish Ensemble and BBC Radio Six Music DJ Nemone on the Saturday morning.

This year the festival will also feature a campsite for up to 500 tents on the field at the town’s Kirkbie Kendal School.

(Image: Kendal Mountain Events)

Back in 2015 it was estimated the festival generated £2.5m for the local economy, a figure which Jacqui and Steve believe will have grown multiple times over the last nine years (a more up to date assessment of its impact is under way).

Meanwhile, the Kendal Mountain Player - the online platform for its selection of shows and films - has hundreds of features which people can watch on a subscription basis.

The Kendal Mountain Book Festival also runs alongside the mountain festival each year, with live readings, talks and interviews with authors.

Running a festival which celebrates the outdoors, nature and everything it represents is a natural fit for Jacqui and Steve, who both came to it following lives exploring snow-capped peaks, whitewater rapids and other wild and mountainous landscapes across the world.

Originally from Auckland, New Zealand, Jacqui set off from her home country to travel the world, a journey which eventually saw her come to London to work in marketing and operations for a whitewater rafting company, organising trips on rivers for customers all over the globe.

"I was everywhere from Ethiopia and Zimbabwe, Nepal, Turkey, running these trips. I lived in Japan and Nepal, back to New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland, Austria,” she says.

“I ended up back in the UK and moved up to Cumbria because I had never been here.”

In Cumbria she worked for outdoor clothing brand The North Face and then team building company Catalyst, where she met Steve.

Steve grew up in Keswick before pursuing a career as a professional ski racer, moving to the French Alps and qualifying as a top-level ski teacher and race coach.

He then joined with two French colleagues to start a mountain sports school in the southern Alps before moving to Norway with his then partner where he coached skiing alongside working for the sales team of an American academic publishing company.

Ultimately, he was given the choice of moving to New York to continue working in publishing or to return to Cumbria to work for Catalyst.

"Working for Catalyst was high-pressured work but very rewarding,” he says.

“They could fly you off to Prague to do a samba drumming event or to do a business development, problem-solving skills session in Mauritius.
“You just had to be mentally agile to be able to adapt. My job was event director, so literally fronting up the events, but also helping them come up with creative solutions.”

Alongside this, Steve was also teaching himself graphic design and eventually started his own creative agency in Kendal.

In 2004 he was approached to help produce promotional materials by the original founders of Kendal Mountain Film Festival, which they had initially started on a small scale in 1980 to make extra money to fund their own adventures.

Steve soon took a lead in organising the event and was joined by Jacqui in 2015.

(Image: Steve Scott)

"I'm probably very commercially focused more than anything,” she says.

“Steve was into the delivery but I could see the potential of working with the brands and so I stepped into that role.

“I'm very good at seeing all the different elements. I can gather a lot of information and consume it all and then spit it out for people. I'm not necessarily a specialist in anything, but I certainly have that ability to have a good overview.

"We saw the potential that there was beyond just mountain sports or mountaineering.

“Although that’s still the core, we've now embraced the fact that access to the outdoors is for everyone, and there's all sorts of activities that you can enjoy in different ways.”

The festival was forced to radically reimagine its format in 2020 when it went entirely online during the pandemic, relying on its digital platform to reach the audience.

It was a successful transition, with over 20,000 tickets sold to people in 84 countries.

"We went digital internally as an organisation as well, so we invested in loads of systems that enabled us to work remotely, that enabled us to digitalise everything we did and that had a massive impact on us,” says Jacqui.

The move to digital communication has given them more avenues for connecting with brands, charities and other organisations, with over 120 now partnering with the festival.

Steve and Jacqui deliberately refer to the brands the festival works with as partners rather than sponsors, as they want to encourage a relationship which is far more creative than transactional.

"We engage with them to amplify their brand story, their brand positioning, to bring it to life," says Jacqui.

"It could be through a physical presence, through presenting sessions or allowing them to do community activities throughout the town.

“We're only limited by their creativity and imagination and the venues' capacity."

The festival’s team of 15 work a four-day week, with one day of remote working and the opportunity of two weeks of entirely remote working each year. Many of them take advantage of the chance to spend time overseas during this period.

Around 500 films are submitted for consideration for the festival each year, with the team watching all of them to make a final selection of just under 200.

"We've got a pre-selection panel of 30-plus people and then the core team of 15 will watch and grade them; it’s a very rigorous process we go through – grading, debating and finally selecting the ‘official selection’ laurel winners. Inevitably we all have our favourites,” says Steve.

Mental wellbeing, conservation, nature connection and the environment are particular areas which have gained more prominence in recent years, as well as films and events which give a platform to people from more diverse backgrounds.

"Today more than half of our audience are female and our team have worked hard on pushing inclusivity over the years,” says Steve.

“Diversity is one thing, but I think the most important word is inclusivity, because we are a trusted platform for many people; we listen to different community needs and love sharing stories, often from underrepresented parts of society.”

Nor does the work of the festival end after one packed weekend in November.

‘Kendal’ goes on tour each year, running events all around UK, with 40 in 2024 attracting a combined live audience of 8,000 people.

Meanwhile, its partner business Kendal China is entering its 10th year employing a team of around 20 who run their own events in locations across the country under the Kendal Mountain Festival brand.

"They have been working with the outdoor industry and using our cultural bridge between Kendal and the Chinese industries in the outdoors; we help them with cultural content, with film programming and taking guest speakers over there,” says Steve.

"They just love everything we do. There are obvious barriers, differences and issues in China that we're all aware of, but I am a real believer in bridge building and creating friendships as a means to progression and understanding.”

Alongside the workload of running the festival, the couple still manage to head off to get some time skiing each year, as well venturing into the local Lake District fells whenever they can - all essential training for the marathon weekend that is to come.

In the future they hope Kendal will continue to be as synonymous with the global outdoors cultural event as Edinburgh is with the Fringe or Hay-on-Wye is with literature.

“I would love to create a centre of knowledge and excellence around nature and the outdoors and I think it would be such a fantastic thing for the town’s reputation and economy. The people who are coming here don’t just say they are coming to the ‘Mountain Festival’, more often than not, they say they are simply coming to ‘Kendal’,” says Jacqui.

“It brings so much pride into the town and it gives so much inspiration for the young people to see that all these people want to come here and that we can put on something that's so incredibly vibrant, internationally respected and outward focusing.”