Famous filmmakers attend, but you don’t see paparazzi crowding around them at the Telluride Film Festival, which begins its 53rd edition today. The audience at Telluride watches movies, not a shower of stars.
One of the founders and long-time directors of the Telluride Film Festival, Bill Pence always told the audience on opening night that “You can’t see everything; you have to make choices.”
Even though the festival lasts just four days, there’s a ton of films to see, films that are beautifully chosen, a mix of films by established filmmakers and new ones, films just out and films from a hundred years ago.
The festival does not release its schedule until the night before it opens, so for more than 50 years, people come on trust; they know something great awaits them.
When people first get the program booklet, they sit around town in ones, twos or threes studying. Slowly, the maze of titles and names takes shape. Yes, I want to see the tribute to Sandra Hüller. She’s magnificent in Anatomy of a Fall, The Zone of Interest and this past year, Project Hail Mary. She’s an actor of remarkable range and power.
She stars in two new films at Telluride -- Rose, about Germany in the 17th century and Fatherland, by the fine director Pawel Pawlikowski about the writer Thomas Mann returning to Germany after World War II, in 1949.
Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mungiu came to Telluride as a first-time director in 2007 with 4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days, a picture about abortion, which won both the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival and also an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Feature.
He comes back to Telluride this year with another Palme d’Or winner from Cannes called Fjord, about a family that moves from Romania to Norway, the wife’s home, and gets into difficulty because their strict fundamentalist Christianity conflicts with the liberal religious attitudes in Norway. Mungiu often watches how religious beliefs affect the way people live their lives.
British director Mike Leigh has been making surprising movies since 1971. They include Vera Drake, Secrets and Lies and Mr. Turner. He bases all his films on improvisations with his actors who together may take a year to develop a script. To say the actors look at home in their roles is an understatement, and through this intensive work with the actors, Leigh’s movies find extraordinary intimacy, understanding of character, and the often-bizarre humor of human life.
His new film, Tender Loving Care, looks at a long marriage and again finds a synthesis of ups and downs.
But all this is not even the tip of the iceberg at this 53rd Telluride Film Festival. Mark Cousins, the maker of a series of stunningly smart and engaging films about the history of cinema, will appear with his latest, The Story of Documentary Film.
A Song for the Snow Lion is about the melting glaciers of Bhutan.
You might not expect to see a Hollywood mainstay like Ron Howard at Telluride, but he’ll present a new documentary about photographer Richard Avedon.
And Tenzing is a dramatic film about Tenzing Norgay, the Sherpa guide who went up Mt. Everest with famous British mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary. Hillary got the credit, no surprise; Tenzing Norgay is often forgotten, although there are even stories that he carried Hillary to the summit. We’ll have to see what the movie does with that.
There’s more than a lot to see this weekend in Telluride.
