One of my favorite sights at the Telluride Film Festival each year comes on Friday, a few hours before the festival begins. The festival does not reveal its schedule in advance, so the couple thousand people who come into town don’t know what’s on tap for them. They huddle on benches, low stone walls or on the grass by the small outdoor theater in the middle of town studying the program booklet, because it takes a while and more than one reading to figure out what to see — and what unhappily you can’t fit into your schedule. As festival founder Bill Pence always said, the schedule forces people to make choices, and while they can be painful, what you do see might well be fabulous.
Compared to the other great international film festivals — Berlin, Cannes, Venice, Toronto — Telluride is tiny. It runs only three and a half days over Labor Day weekend, in basically eight small theaters, not counting the outdoor movies and the special screenings in the town library. There’s no competition, no audience awards, no press screenings. Every few years, one of the Denver TV stations sends a crew down to get footage of the celebrities — it is a film festival, isn’t it? — and the crews usually can’t find anyone to film.
Telluride is not Cannes, not Sundance, not the Golden Globes or Oscars. What Telluride is, is movies, carefully chosen, properly presented — to an audience that comes for the films and the conversations, and pretty much not for the glitz. The famous filmmakers who do come, are told they won’t be bothered, and they’re not. You might wind up sitting next to Clint Eastwood because the famous folks who do come to Telluride, also come to see the films.
Telluride puts on an elegant schedule, and it’s not just for film experts in the know. But it is for people who want a challenge and who care more about seeing great film than about telling their friends what celebrities they saw.
One way to look at the festival is the tributes, one each evening to people who are major forces in the cinema. This year, one tribute goes to actress/director Sarah Polley, a filmmaker who has grown steadily in power and stature. The second night’s award will go to the exceptional actress Cate Blanchette now starring in a film called Tár about the first major female orchestra conductor in Germany. And the third tribute goes to Mark Cousins, best-known for his 15-hour The Story of Film: An Odyssey. It comes in sections, in which Cousins shows and discusses dozens of films. His understandings and insights are dazzling; every time I watch a segment, I learn something new from this remarkable man.
The festival will screen Cousins’ latest work, The March on Rome, about the dictator Mussolini taking over Italy — a movie about fascism and dictatorship important for our time.
But the tributes are but one aspect of The Telluride Film Festival. There are new films from other great filmmakers — Broker by Hirokazu Kore-eda is about con men selling babies to adoptive parents; Tori and Lokita by Belgian directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne tells a story of two young African refugees trying to get into Belgium. Kentucky Pride is a 1925 silent film by John Ford, and the phenomenal French film archivist and restorer Serge Bromberg will present a program of films by the French filmmaking pioneer, magician Georges Méliès.
All of this and more unfolds in the box canyon that contains Telluride. For film lovers, pure heaven.
