The last time I went to the Telluride Film Festival, it was under very different circumstances. In 2021, the film world (along with the rest of the planet) was still dealing with the effects of the worst moments of the pandemic. To attend that year, you needed to be vaccinated and have a negative COVID test. While there, you were also required to be tested again to enter any festival parties. So it was a constant bombardment of check-ins to see if you were COVID-free. And yet, it was the closest to normal I’d felt in over a year. The films were fantastic, too: “The Power of the Dog,” “The Lost Daughter,” “Petite Maman,” “Spencer” and more all played at that 48th edition. That’s why there was a sense of relief and optimism among attendees that year.
This time around, at the 51st edition, the pandemic is on the periphery, but no less present. However, normality has returned. I was even luckier to introduce a few films and moderate a couple of Q&A sessions. But above all, this Telluride was significantly blacker. Those ingredients made this trip a refreshing return to a festival where, frankly, the first time in its extremely white surroundings, I felt alienated.
Just as I wrote about Locarno, getting to Telluride involves a long drive, two flights, and a two-and-a-half-hour bus ride from Grand Junction, Colorado, before reaching the lush canyon where the festival is located. I stayed with a lovely couple who woke up as early as I did and watched almost as many films as I did. They are like many of the citizens of Telluride; they are film lovers who live under a blanket of stars so bright that the movie stars feel right at home.
My film experience started slowly, and the first day was only sparked by Morgan Neville’s animated Lego biopic, “Piece by Piece,” directed by Pharrell Williams. That day I managed to screen a few films at the Backlot Theater, an intimate sixty-seat space attached to the city library that exclusively screens documentaries. There I screened “Nobu,” Matt Tyrnauer’s investigation into famed Japanese sushi chef Nobu Matsuhisa. The Backlot was also packed for “Casa Bonita Mi Amor!”, Arthur Brandford’s love documentary that follows South Park Creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone's attempt to revive a historic, tacky restaurant from their childhood.
I particularly enjoyed “Her Name Was Moviola,” a film I desperately hope you get to own. Directed by Howard Berry and written by Walter Murch (“The Godfather” and “Apocalypse Now”), it’s a documentary in which Berry and Murch team up to demonstrate the editing process for a film. slow motionFor their task, they gathered the necessary equipment and asked Mike Leigh for permission to re-cut a scene from his biopic about JWM Turner, “Turner.” The result is not only a wonderful experiment, but also a necessary chapter in film history that showcases the craft, patience and thought process behind filmmaking. Watching Murch riding the Moviola is simply cinematic magic.
The next day, I was incredibly lucky to sit down for a Q&A with Berry and Murch, my first taste of how the best questions come from the audience at Backlot. Watching Murch, the editor behind the great New Hollywood classics, talk about his editing ethics and thought process reminded me, and likely many others, of what makes his book so special. In the blink of an eye A must read for any film lover.
But as I said, Telluride was also blacker this year. That was evident at the festival brunch where John David Washington and Malcolm Washington appeared with “The Piano Lesson,” RaMell Ross and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor with “Nickel Boys,” Pharrell with “Piece By Piece,” Yashaddai Owens with “Jimmy,” and more. The breadth and depth of these black projects thickened the rarefied mountain air with a different feel, one that expressed a desire to expand the variety of stories regularly available at the festival.
And while blackness is inherently a political existence, the festival broadened its political footprint with films that speak to this moment. There was “September 5,” which chronicles the terrorist attack at the 1972 Munich Olympics; exiled filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof’s defiant feminist narrative, “The Seed of the Sacred Fig”; the climate change documentary “The White House Effect”; the harrowing documentary by a Palestinian-Israeli collective “No Other Land”; and the Hillary Clinton-produced abortion film “Zurawski v Texas.”
Telluride also confronted its checkered history by programming Andres Veiel’s “Riefenstahl,” a startling documentary about the disgraced Nazi filmmaker responsible for “Triumph of the Will.” In 1974, the festival honored Riefenstahl’s career. When asked about the controversy surrounding the director, “Sunset Boulevard” actress Gloria Swanson, who was also being honored by the festival along with Riefenstahl, responded: The New York Times:“Why? Is Leni Riefenstahl waving a Nazi flag? I thought Hitler was dead,” he continued. “Why don’t you ask about it?” meI don't want to talk about scandals. There have been many rumors and scandals about me. Why don't you ask me about that?
I was lucky enough to speak with Veiel after presenting the film, a picture that so succinctly revealed the contradictions in Riefenstahl's personal accounts of her life as to make it almost impossible to separate her from her vile art.
After a few days spent hopping from theater to theater and having coffee with Payal Kapadia, the brilliant filmmaker behind “All We Imagine as Light,” or attending parties where the biggest star was the adorable Great Dane from Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s “The Friend,” it was time to hop on the bus back home to the airport. On that bus was Veiel, still beaming from his huge success in Venice and Telluride. After miles and miles, the mountains shrank to cracked plains, and for the first time, I began to miss the trees, the celestial stars, and the atmosphere of “The Show.”