The last time I went to the Telluride Film Festival it was under vastly different circumstances. Back in 2021, the film world (along with the rest of the planet) was still grappling with the effects of the pandemic’s worst stretches. To attend that year, you needed to be vaccinated and have a negative COVID test. While there you were also required to retest to get into any festival party. So it was a constant barrage of checking in to see if you were COVID-free. And yet, it was the closest to normalcy I had felt in over a year. The films were also fantastic: “The Power of the Dog,” “The Lost Daughter,” “Petite Maman,” “Spencer” and more played in that 48th edition. That’s why there was a sense of relief and optimism among attendees that year.
This time around, for the 51st edition, the pandemic is on the periphery but no less present. But the normalcy has returned. I was even more fortunate to introduce a few movies and moderate a couple of Q&As. Most of all, this Telluride was significantly Blacker. Those ingredients made this trip a refreshing return to a festival where, quite frankly, the first time around in its extremely white milieu, I felt alienated.
Much like I wrote about Locarno, it’s a trek to arrive at Telluride: a car ride, two flights, and a two-and-a-half-hour bus ride from Grand Junction, Colorado await you before you get to the lush box canyon where the festival is situated. I stayed with a lovely couple who woke up as early as me and saw nearly as many films as I did. They’re like many of the citizens of Telluride; they’re film lovers who live under a blanket of stars so bright, the movie stars feel at home.
My film watching began slowly, only sparking with Morgan Neville’s Pharrell Wiliams animated Lego biopic “Piece by Piece” on the first day. That day I did manage to introduce a few films at the Backlot Theater, an intimate space attached to the town’s library that seats sixty people to screen exclusively documentaries. There, I introduced “Nobu,” Matt Tyrnauer’s survey of famed Japanese sushi chef Nobu Matsuhisa. The Backlot was also packed for “¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor!,” Arthur Brandford’s loving documentary that follows South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s bid to reclaim a tacky historical restaurant from their childhood.
I especially enjoyed “Her Name Was Moviola,” a film I desperately hope is acquired. Directed by Howard Berry and written by Walter Murch (“The Godfather” and “Apocalypse Now”), it’s a documentary that sees Berry and Murch team together to demonstrate the process of editing on a Moviola. For their task, they gathered together the necessary equipment and requested permission from Mike Leigh to recut a scene from his J.W.M. Turner biopic “Turner.” The result is not just a wonderful experimentation, but also a necessary chapter in film history that shows the craft, the patience, and the thought process behind filmmaking. Watching Murch editing at the Moviola is simply movie magic.
The next day, I was incredibly fortunate to sit down for a Q&A with Berry and Murch, my first taste of how the best audience questions come at the Backlot. Watching Murch, the editor behind the biggest classics of New Hollywood, talk about his ethos for editing and his thought process reminded me, and probably many others, of what makes his book In The Blink of an Eye a necessary read for any film lover.
But as I said, Telluride was Blacker this year too. That much 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 thin mountain air with a different sensation, one that expressed a desire to expand the tent of stories regularly available at the festival.
And while Blackness is inherently a political existence, the festival expanded its political footprint with films that speak to this moment. There was “September 5” recounting the terrorist attack at the Munich Olympics in 1972; exiled filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof’s defiant feminist narrative “The Seed of the Sacred Fig”; the climate change documentary “The White House Effect”; a Palestinian-Isreali collective’s searing documentary “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 behind “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 alongside Riefenstahl, replied to The New York Times: “Why? Is Leni Riefenstahl waving a Nazi flag? I thought Hitler was dead,” she continued. “Why don’t you ask about me? I don’t want to talk about scandal. There has been plenty of rumor and scandal about me. Why don’t you ask me about that?”
I was fortunate enough to speak to Veiel after introducing the film, a picture that so succinctly revealed the contradictions in Riefenstahl’s personal accounts of her life as to make it nearly impossible to ever separate her from her vile art.
After spending a few days jumping from theater to theater and having coffee with Payal Kapadia, the brilliant filmmaker behind “All We Imagine as Light,” or ducking into parties where the biggest star was the adorable Great Dane from Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s “The Friend”—it was time to board the bus back home to the airport. On that bus was Veiel, still beaming from his breakout success at Venice and Telluride. After miles after miles, the mountains shrunk into cracked plains, and for the first time, I began to miss the trees, the celestial stars, and the atmosphere of the “Show.”