Venture Outdoors wants you to stay inside ... for just a couple of nights. Long enough anyway to watch movies about people who don't, well, stay inside.

It's the return of the annual Banff Mountain Film Festival, a traveling series of outdoor documentary films presented in Pittsburgh as a fund-raiser for Venture Outdoors, a nonprofit outdoors recreation facilitator. At its new location at the Carnegie Library Music Hall in Munhall, Banff brings enough films -- ranging in length from a few minutes to almost an hour -- to fill two evenings with beautifully filmed stories of mountain biking, climbing, paddling, mountaineering, animal adventures and more.

"These really are some of the best outdoors films out there now," said Venture Outdoors VP Rob Walters. "Even if you're active outdoors, it's probably not something you see every day. There's a lot of art to it -- some of these movies are very well made."

Among the best of this year's batch is "24 Solo," a captivating account of a 24-hour endurance mountain bike race.

Director Jason Berry, winner of an award for a previous adventure film, and his staff traveled to Georgia's granite hillsides where biker Chris Eatough was seeking his seventh consecutive 24 Hours of Adrenaline solo world championship. Instead of getting the movie Berry intended to film, he documented a dramatic turn of events and a fascinating human interest story.

"Chris had beaten everybody so badly [in previous events] that we really were there to watch him win," said Berry. "But I knew the race would be hard and hard to shoot, so I hired a few other people to help. With a lot of adventure films, they keep filming the guy doing the thing over and over until they get a good shot. But this was documenting a live event. If something happened it would happen fast -- it'd be easy to miss."

With several camera operators working in shifts and one on a bike and fitted with a helmet camera, Berry's team caught Eatough in the unfamiliar position of lagging behind by as much as a lap on the grueling seven-mile bike course. The drama intensified in the final moments when the exhausted body of leader Craig Gordon began breaking down, forcing the bicycling cameraman into an ethical dilemma -- to continue his filming duties without interfering in the race or intercede in a medical emergency.

"24 Solo" ends with one of the riders in a real-life "agony of defeat" moment as overwhelming as anything in sports history.

"All the emotion is real," said Berry, "happening right there in front of us. These people were fried, physically and emotionally."

Berry said some of the film's characters were "a little upset" that their weakest moments were captured on film. A biker who had "iced" a difficult turn many times is filmed the one time he fell. Three of the four emotionally drained women in the film are shown crying, and Berry said the helmet-cam operator was later embarrassed that he's shown "in a moment of indecision," audibly waffling over whether to help a man so seriously injured that he nearly died.

"Nobody likes to see himself breaking apart," said Berry. "I think the greatest compliment is that people who aren't mountain bikers can really enjoy this movie."

In the festival's other hour-long documentary, "Searching for the Coast Wolves," former world champion cross-country skier Gudrun Pflueger researches a genetically isolated pack of wolves living on the Pacific coast of British Columbia.

Unlike most wolves, this pack hunts for migrating salmon. Surrounded by spectacular mountains, plains and boreal rainforests, Pflueger is filmed in a dramatic personal encounter with the wolves.

Walters said the Banff Mountain Film Festival's decision to include cultural, animal and educational adventures sets it apart from some extreme sports film spectaculars.

"The hook and bullet crowd, the regular outdoors crowd -- I think there's a lot of overlap there, more than some people would think," said Walters. "These films show something they can all appreciate: the cultural aspect of it, people who live in these gorgeous areas, who live off these remarkable features."