2007 TBA Below (click here)
A wide range of accommodations is available in the town of Telluride and nearby Mountain Village. Telluride's downtown lodging facilities are conveniently located within easy walking distance of most Festival sites and lodgers in Mountain Village can easily access Festival sites via the free gondola. Acme Passholders may wish to obtain accommodations in the Mountain Village, where Chuck Jones’ Cinema is located.
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As flights into the Telluride area are limited, attendees are strongly urged to immediately contact Telluride Central Reservations, the Festival's travel partner, to arrange transportation. They have access to flights unavailable elsewhere, including charter flights from Los Angeles and Denver. Contact Telluride Central Reservations via e-mail to make a reservation request.
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Steven Winn: "Telluride a major player in film festival circuit"
Courtesy of SF Gate.com Wednesday,
August 29, 2007
Thirty-three years ago, when Bay Area film polymath Tom Luddy and some
colleagues decided to launch a Labor Day weekend festival in the remote
Rocky Mountain town of Telluride, Colo., a lot of people must have
wondered what they were thinking. Film festivals were a relative rarity
back then, as opposed to the seemingly limitless growth industry they
have since become. Almost all of them took place in major cities -
Berlin, Venice, New York, San Francisco. Cannes, a resort town on the
French Riviera, was the geographical exception that proved the rule.
Today, riding a recent wave of high-profile U.S. and world premieres,
the Telluride Film Festival is a major destination and closely watched
cinematic barometer. In 2004, "Hotel Rwanda," "Ray" and "Kinsey" opened
at Telluride. In 2005, it was "Brokeback Mountain," "Capote" and "Walk
the Line." Last year's lineup included "The Lives of Others," "The Last
King of Scotland," "Babel" and "Little Children."
Gary Meyer, the Landmark Theatres co-founder who now co-directs the
Telluride Festival with Luddy, believes there are at least two
foreign-language films on this year's bill that "will make a lot of
noise on 10-best lists and during the awards season." What Meyer
couldn't do was name those or any other films that will be screened.
It's a time-honored tradition that the program at Telluride remain a
closely guarded secret. The identity of the 22 feature films scheduled
for this year's festival, which opens Friday and continues through Labor
Day, are embargoed until Thursday afternoon.
The Telluride Film Festival is, in many ways, an anomaly, a proudly
independent operation that goes its own way, relies on reputation to
attract visitors to its pricey and out-of-the-way venue and routinely
sells out. But it also offers a perspective on the current
festival-driven film world, the competitive and sometimes courtly
behaviors it produces, and some effects of the mind-boggling number of
films that festival programmers and attendees see.
Luddy, Meyer and this year's guest director, film scholar and archivist
Edith R. Kramer, discussed their work over lunch in Berkeley one sunny
day. None of them looked as if they had been spending much time
outdoors.
Meyer began with a nostalgic lament for the days when submissions were
received on videotape rather than DVD, the form in which most of the 500
or so unsolicited entries now arrive. "At least I could record 'The
Sopranos' over them," he said of the rejected tapes. "About all you can
do with a DVD is use it as a coaster."
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Humor
may be essential for the sanity of any film festival programmer. While
many of the Telluride aspirants are weeded out by a team of screeners,
the directors log plenty of screen time with unknowns, hoping for an
exciting, out-of-the-blue discovery.
That's not the only or even the primary way they scout for films. Much
of the work of putting together a festival is done at other festivals.
Luddy attended the Berlin Film Festival this year. He and Meyer were
both at Cannes.
Luddy is a seasoned connoisseur of festival serendipity, which can cut
both ways. Last year, for example, "The Lives of Others" fell into
Telluride's lap after both the Berlin and Cannes festivals passed on the
highly praised story of a Stasi surveillance operation.
"We were the first festival to show it," said Luddy. That happened
because the Berlin directors, who are often criticized for not showing
enough German films, already had four of them in place when they saw
'Lives.' They decided, apparently for reasons of balance, that they
couldn't add another German film. "The rumor is that Cannes passed on it
because Berlin turned it down," added Luddy with a bemused smile. The
film went on to win the Oscar for best foreign film.
"The Boys of St. Vincent," a Canadian docudrama about priests molesting
orphan boys, came to Telluride in 1992 under comparable circumstances.
The home-country Toronto International Film Festival never even
considered "Boys" because it was originally made for TV, not the big
screen. It was added to the Toronto program as an "extra" at the last
minute, after the premiere created a stir in Colorado.
"It's very strange what goes on among people who run festivals," noted
Kramer. "There is this pleasure of getting a film that someone else has
passed on. On the other hand, you start to mistrust films when certain
colleagues turn them down."
Competition and insecurity aren't the only factors. Inter-festival
politics and politesse scuttled hoped-for screenings of "The Queen"
(paired with a Helen Mirren tribute) and "Pan's Labyrinth" at Telluride.
When Stephen Frears' film about Queen Elizabeth and Princess Diana was
selected to open the glossy New York Film Festival, Luddy backed off.
"There's this understanding that we're not going to make trouble," he
said. "Pan's Labyrinth" got away because the director, Guillermo del
Toro, was a Venice International Film Festival juror. He couldn't get
away from Venice in time to make it to Telluride, and he couldn't bear
the idea of his film premiering in Colorado when he was still in Italy.
Venice (today-Sept. 8), Toronto (Sept. 6-15) and Telluride
(Friday-Monday) all crowd each other on the increasingly crammed
international film festival calendar. The clamor for attention is now
almost constant. In the Bay Area, for alphabetical starters, there are
festivals devoted to American Indian, Arab, Armenian and Asian American
film. June brings the Queer Women of Color Film Festival. July offers
the San Francisco Sex Worker Film and Arts Festival. The call for
entries is now out for next year's San Francisco Ocean Film Festival.
Any director without a film festival credit of one kind or another must
not be trying very hard.
Kramer described a film festival in Bologna she's attended a number of
times, where screenings begin at 9 a.m. and end late at night, day after
day. "Is this any way to see movies?" she asked. "No, it's not normal.
People ask, 'What did you see?' and you realize one film is running into
another." Even a manageable festival like Telluride, where people are
gorging on 22 films, various shorts and other programs in four days, has
a potential to overwhelm.
But seeing lots of movies in a concentrated way - the good, the not-so
and the dismal - can also be liberating. "Most good films, even very
good films, may only have a few moments that are terrific," said Kramer,
"and lots of flaws. Audiences often expect things to be perfect. But
they're not, they can't be. It's so difficult to make a good film. There
are so many decisions a filmmaker has to make, under all kinds of
pressures. If something redeeming comes out of that process, it's really
pretty amazing."
E-mail Steven Winn at
swinn@sfchronicle.com
Telluride Film Festival 2007 "To Be Announced"
Listings:
Monday, September 3, 2007
PALM NOON PM-SNEAK PREVIEW-JUNO w/Q&A
PALM 3 PM-12 THE COUNTERFEITERS
PALM 5:30 PM-5 RAILS AND TIES
PALM 8:15 PM-17 INTO THE WILD
GALAXY 3:15 PM-27 MARGOT AT THE WEDDING
GALAXY 6:15 PM-SNEAK PREVIEW-JUNO
GALAXY 8:30 PM-9 THE BAND'S VISIT
CJC 12:30 PM-7 THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY
CJC 3:30 PM-SNEAK PREVIEW-THE SAVAGES w/Q&A
CJC 6:30 PM-c (Info on page 38) STEEP
SOH 3:30 PM-19 JAR CITY
SOH 6 PM-8 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS (this starts 15 minutes
later than grid)
SOH 8:30 PM-28 ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD
NUGGET 1:30 PM-25 PEOPLE ON SUNDAY w/Mont Alto Orchestra
NUGGET 3:30 PM-13 PERSEPOLIS
NUGGET 6 PM-22 BRICK LANE
NUGGET 8:30 PM-SNEAK PREVIEW-THE SAVAGES
MASONS 1:30 PM-26 CARGO 200
MASONS 4:15 PM-32 DILLINGER IS DEAD
MASONS 6:30 PM-38 STUDENT PRINTS
MASONS 8:45 PM-20 ELLYFISH
PIERRE 1:30 PM-24 MY ENEMY'S ENEMY
PIERRE 3:45 PM-39 CALLING CARDS
PIERRE 6:15 PM-21 BLIND MOUNTAIN
PIERRE 8:30 PM-11c ZUBEIDAA
ELKS PARK 8:30 PM-29 I'M NOT THERE
MEMORABILIA AT BRIGADOON - Final Day Sale - Discounts Galore
COURTHOUSE CONVERSATION 10 AM
Jason Reitman - Director, JUNO & Tamara Jenkins - Director, THE SAVAGES
TOWN PARK-MONDAY SEMINAR-NOON
"Is there a woman behind every good movie? The Gender shift in the film
world."*
Moderator: Steve Wasserman
Panelists:
Tannishtha Chatterjee Actor, BRICK LANE
Diablo Cody Screenwriter, JUNO
Allison Eastwood Director, RAILS AND TIES
Jyll Johnstone Director, HATS OFF
Jennifer Jason Leigh Actor, MARGOT AT THE WEDDING
Laura Linney Actor, THE SAVAGES
Alexandra Sun Producer, BLIND MOUNTAIN
*Panelists Subject to Change
**Your Attendance Is Required in 2008
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2007 Sneak Preview - THE SAVAGES
Former Telluride Tributee Laura Linney and Oscar-winning actor Philip
Seymour Hoffman play a brother and sister who are yanked from their busy
lives as, respectively, an aspiring playwright and college professor,
when their father becomes ill. Achingly funny, familiar and poignant,
THE SAVAGES is a showcase for two of America's most perceptive,
expressive actors and as a brilliant return to feature filmmaking by
writer-director Tamara Jenkins (SLUMS OF BEVERLY HILLS). (U.S., 2007,
113m) In person: Laura Linney, Tamara Jenkins
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2007 Sneak Preview - THE PRINCESS OF NEBRASKA
Wayne Wang's second collaboration with writer Yiyun Li follows 24 hours
in the life of Sasha, a young Chinese woman who is four months pregnant,
through a fling back in Beijing. Interrupting her first year of college
in Nebraska, she travels to San Francisco to abort the child and
confront her lover's male friend. Sasha's unborn baby takes her on a
daring journey from Beijing to the streets of San Francisco, and is the
untold umbilical film to A THOUSAND YEARS OF GOOD PRAYERS. (U.S., 2007,
78m) In person: Wayne Wang, Yiyun Li
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2007 Sneak Preview - REDACTED
From early counter culture classics GREETINGS and HI MOM, to forays into
Hitchcockian suspense like DRESSED TO KILL and BODY DOUBLE and the
socially realistic epics like SCARFACE and CASUALTIES OF WAR, director
Brian De Palma has been a major force in American cinema. He has managed
to focus on themes of voyeurism, violence, and fractured identity, while
developing his own utterly distinctive cinematic language. In REDACTED,
De Palma tells a tiny horrific anecdote of the Iraq war. He's
particularly fascinated by how the chaos there is mediated by multiple
cinematic perspectives, a soldier's video diary, verite journalism, and
Internet imagery. In REDACTED De Palma manages to gather together all
the topics that have previously obsessed him, now fusing them with a new
element of moral indignation that humanizes and deepens his work. Made
on a tiny budget with an excellent cast of unknowns REDACTED may be the
crowning accomplishment of Brian De Palma's already illustrious career.
-LG (86 min)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2007Sneak Preview - JUNO
Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page) is a smart and sassy sixteen-year-old.
Director Jason Reitman (THANK YOU FOR SMOKING) balances serious problems
she faces with smart humor when Juno has sex with her friend (Michael
Cera) and decides to give birth to the resulting baby but offer it for
adoption to a couple (Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman) she finds in
the Penny Saver. Diablo Cody s ( Candy Girl ) witty script provides
twists and unexpected surprises. Strong performances by all with young
Ellen Page proving she will be a star. (92 min) In person: Director
Jason Reitman, Writer Diablo Cody
TFF Discoveries Recognized by Golden Globes
For us to attempt to choose "winners" from among Telluride selections
would be like trying to pick one child over another (wink to CARMICHAEL
& SHANE). We just can't do it. However, we must say that those with a
talent for such things seem to repeatedly reward artists and films
featured at our little event.
At this year's recent Golden Globe ceremony, The Hollywood Foreign Press
has awarded top honors to Alejandro González Iñárritu's masterfully
crafted BABEL, for Best Motion Picture - Drama. Speaking at a Festival
seminar last Labor Day weekend, Alejandro revealed one of the great
inspirations for his non-linear technique. "My father, always a great
storyteller, started in the middle. He would start with a hook from the
middle someplace. Then he'd go back for the beginnings. Then more hooks.
Back and forth toward the end."
The HFP also named Forest Whitaker as Best Actor for his menacing,
multilayered portrayal of Idi Amin in THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND. After
screening the film at our last Festival, Joe Morgenstern wrote in the
Wall Street Journal, "Forest Whitaker's portrayal in THE LAST KING OF
SCOTLAND is enormous, mercurial, terrifying, endlessly seductive and,
more simply put, one of the great performances in modern movie history."
We re glad to see we're not the only ones to notice.
Congratulations to everyone who worked so hard to make these great
movies, and thanks to the Hollywood Foreign Press for their continuing
dedication to celebrating the very best work in contemporary cinema.
TFF Discoveries Honored by European Film Awards
We are proud to announce that two films featured in our 33rd Festival
program have taken awards at the EFA in Warsaw, Poland. VOLVER, directed
by Pedro Almodovar, walked away with a stunning five awards, including
Best Director and Best Cinematography. Its star, Telluride Tributee
Penelope Cruz took the award for Best Actress.
For all of it's success at the ceremony, however, VOLVER didn't quite
edge out THE LIVES OF OTHERS (also screened at our last festival) by
Florian Henckel, which was honored with the award for Best Film. We send
a hearty congratulations out to all of them - well done!
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