Bryan Smith would like us to know that everything we see in his movies is real, thank you very much.

“We’ve been told too many times that we shot something too well,” he says. “It’s a little gut-wrenching to hear people say, ‘Oh, that wasn’t true,’ although less so for me and more so for the guys who achieved what they did.”

With two of the strongest titles in the program arriving courtesy of the Squamish-based adventure filmmaker, attendees of this year’s Vancouver International Mountain Film Festival will want to take note. Screening at the Cinematheque on Tuesday (February 14), “Locked In” (directed with David Pearson) captures in eye-popping detail the very first descent by kayak into Papua New Guinea’s ferocious Beriman River gorge.

Closing the festival four days later at the Centennial Theatre, the dizzying “North of Known” marries Smith’s craft to an even more insane project: the traversing of the 650-kilometre Alaska Range by paragliders Gavin McClurg and Dave Turner.

“Honestly, the odds at which we could see Gavin succeeding on Alaska were so low that we were like, ‘We don’t know how we can pitch this,’ ” Smith admits during a call to the Georgia Straight from Houston, Texas. He adds that an unknown outcome is also essential to what he does.

“It’s about generating an idea that’s authentic. When [white-water kayaker] Ben Stookesberry said ‘Papua New Guinea’, we said, ‘Now you’re talking. Now we’re in the middle of nowhere.’ ”

While nothing in either “Locked In” or “North of Known” has been “faked or set up”, a charge Smith says has been levelled at both films, he’s more than ready to discuss the grey area that comes with documentary filmmaking. In both movies, we’re asked to believe that Smith’s subjects are alone in a dangerously inhospitable place.

“But they’re not,” he says, with a chuckle. “We’re there the whole time. But we’re also trying to never slow down the adventure, and I think that’s what people don’t get. There was never a moment on either of those two films where we said, ‘Hey, guys, hold up for a couple days here; we need to set up a bunch of things.’ ”

On the contrary, his four-person crew was trudging across the barren plains of Alaska behind McClurg and Turner, often ending up with no more than a few minutes of footage per day, “and just trying to keep up with the guys the rest of the time.” Perseverance, luck, and an intuition for timing are what eventually coincided to produce something like the phenomenal aerial vistas of “North of Known” or the butt-clenching perils captured in “Locked In”.

That and a filmmaker’s own unique gifts for survival. Smith recalls that while Stookesberry and his crew were navigating the various deathtraps along the Beriman Gorge, he was negotiating with two machete-wielding tribes to let them proceed at all.

“And they were pissed,” he says. “The kayakers themselves were in a situation that was life-or-death on a regular basis on the river, and we were in a situation with human politics.”

The most dangerous adventure of all!

“Absolutely,” Smith answers with a laugh.

5 flicks to catch at the Vancouver International Mountain FIlm Festival 2017

The Vancouver International Mountain Film Festival takes place at various venues from Friday (February 10) to February 18. More information is at the Vancouver International Mountain Felm Festival website.