As always, the Telluride Film Festival, which runs over the four-day Labor Day weekend (this year, August 30 – September 2) in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, waits until the day before the Friday festival launch to release its official selection.
Per usual, many of the slate’s titles have already leaked via publicists and attendees, and few of the most prominent first showings — from Edward Berger’s pope drama “Conclave” (Focus) and Jason Reitman’s recreation of the 1975 launch of SNL, “Saturday Night” (Sony) to RaMell’s Ross’s Colson Whitehead adaptation “Nickel Boys” (Amazon/MGM) — are news at this point. Still, there’s plenty new to dive into.
Festival director Julie Huntsinger, who has been running the festival for years but officially took over the solo reins from the late Tom Luddy with last year’s 50th edition, got on the phone with IndieWire to discuss the selection of nearly sixty feature films, short films, and revival programs representing twenty-six countries (along with Tributes, Conversations, and Panels).
Among the likely Oscar contenders is “Nickel Boys,” she said. “It’s such a towering achievement. I couldn’t believe it. My jaw dropped to the floor. You almost can’t speak after because it’s cinematically engaging, arresting. It is emotionally rewarding. It should be one of the most talked about films of the whole year.” (She also singled out the performance of Gabriel LaBelle as the young Lorne Michaels in “Saturday Night,” along with the rest of the cast.)
Loyal attendees from around the country know that they can only experience a slice of the riches on offer each Labor Day weekend. And many filmmakers, such as Alexander Payne, Alfonso Cuaron (series “Disclaimer”), Reitman, and Ken Burns (series “Leonardo Da Vinci”) return to the festival when they can, whether they have a film or not. This year, festival perennial Werner Herzog will be otherwise engaged, but knocking around Telluride will be Karyn Kusama, David Lowery, Casey Affleck, and Ramin Bahrani, who are all coming without films.
According to Huntsinger, the vibe of the festival selection is lighter than recent years, “after so much darkness,” she said. “We had a couple of years extremely impacted by COVID. We then had the strike last year. All of that was radiating out in other businesses and people, in other ways. People want to have a reason to live again, that it can’t all be like, ‘Oh, well, we’re all doomed.’ People want to be uplifted, and artistically.”
Many of the selections debuted at other festivals such as Sundance, which played Nora Fingscheidt’s portrait of an alcoholic, “The Outrun” (Sony Pictures Classics), starring four-time Oscar nominee Saoirse Ronan, who is getting a Tribute; and documentary “Will & Harper,” starring Will Farrell and Harper Steele, one of four Netflix titles on display this weekend. They also include Jacques Audiard’s audacious Spanish-language musical “Emilia Pérez,” which collected two awards at Cannes (the Jury Prize and Best Actress, for the ensemble), which is generating Oscar talk. The French auteur will accept the festival’s highest honor, the Silver Medallion, along with three-time Oscar-winning editor Thelma Schoonmaker (“The Departed,” “Raging Bull,” “The Aviator”).
New Netflix movies are “Martha,” from Oscar-nominated documentarian R.J. Cutler (“Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry”), whose vivid subject Martha Stewart will accompany the film; and producer Denzel Washington’s latest August Wilson adaptation, “The Piano Lesson,” a family affair directed by rookie Malcolm Washington and starring John David Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, and rising star Danielle Deadwyler, who will come to Telluride.
Neon will unveil to an American audience its Cannes Palme d’Or winner, Sean Baker’s “Anora,” introducing such breakouts as Mikey Madison and Mark Eydelshteyn, who play a mismatched sex worker and a spoiled Russian scion, respectively. Neon is also screening another Cannes prize-winner, exiled Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof’s “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” which Iran would never submit for the Oscar, so Germany did it instead.
The drama continues over which film India will submit for the Oscar this year. Two Indian films from Cannes 2024 are at Telluride: “All We Imagine as Light” (Janus/Sideshow), Payal Kapadia’s lyric portrait of three women in Mumbai who leave the city to find peace, which won the Grand Prix and is beloved by critics; and “Santosh” (Metrograph), from another woman director, Sandhya Suri, about a woman who replaces her husband on the local police force after he dies.
“It’s a disciplined, taut procedural,” said Huntsinger. “And then you’ve got ‘All We Imagine Is Light,’ this beautiful, impressionistic, expansive study of the feminine. It’s hopeful that both of these films came out of India, which is not the most progressive of countries.” The festival’s opening party on Friday, The Feed, will have an Indian theme in honor of both films.
Plenty of pictures are up for sale, including Errol Morris’ “Separated,” his emotionally explosive investigation into the Trump administration’s cruel and inhumane “zero tolerance” policy that separated families at the U.S./ Mexican border, and David Siegel and Scott McGehee’s “The Friend,” starring Naomi Watts as a grieving woman who adopts her recently deceased friend’s Great Dane, which Huntsinger believes could finally break out these respected filmmakers.
Music is all over the program. Zoe Saldana and Selena Gomez sing their hearts out in “Emilia Pérez.” Joshua Oppenheimer turned his first fiction feature “The End,” a dark story of rich billionaires building an underground bunker, into a musical starring a singing Tilda Swinton. Angelina Jolie had to learn to sing opera for Pablo Larrain’s recent Netflix pick-up “Maria,” which combines her voice with Maria Callas. “She plays Maria in this really cool way,” said Huntsinger, “with a wry, knowing, tiny little underscore of humor to her, even though there’s a heaviness. The screenplay of ‘Maria’ [by Steven Knight] is some of the best writing I have witnessed in a long time.”
Australian Michael Gracey, who directed “The Greatest Showman,” returns with another musical, “Better Man,” featuring Robbie Williams. “From the first frame, it grabs you in the most exuberant, lovely, excited dance hug,” said Huntsinger. “It’ll be a big surprise for a lot of people. ‘The End,’ you could talk about these movies in the same way. There’s a lot of joy in this program. And in [musical] ‘The End,’ Joshua is presenting some stuff that is sad and heavy about what we’ve done to the planet. How can we repair ourselves and it?”
Documentaries dominate the lineup. “There are so many docs this year,” said Huntsinger, who left quite a few out of her selection. “It makes my heart a little bit sad, because they’re all clamoring for attention.” Lauren Greenfield is showing her FX series “Social Studies,” about the impact of social media on teenagers at a Los Angeles high school.
“Blink,” from Oscar-winning “Navalny” director Daniel Roher is about three members of a Quebecois family diagnosed with a genetic degenerative eye disease (retinitis pigmentosa) that will eventually render the children blind. The parents decide to give them visual memories. “They take them around the world,” said Huntsinger. “They had the kids create a visual bucket list. One of the things, for example, is having a juice box on a camel. And they go and they do it in a big, cool desert. It’s never maudlin. It is never manipulative.” The family will be in Telluride.
Finally, for those who worry about the high cost of attending the festival, Huntsinger successfully brought down the price of the Telluride charter flight from LAX to Montrose by $500, to $1,260 round trip.
Here’s the main program of new feature films and episodic works to play in its main program, The SHOW:
- “All We Imagine as Light” (d. Payal Kapadia, France-India-Netherlands-Luxembourg, 2024)
- “Anora” (d. Sean Baker, U.S., 2024)
- “Apocalypse in the Tropics” (d. Petra Costa, Brazil-U.S.-Denmark, 2024)
- “Better Man” (d. Michael Gracey, Australia, 2024)
- “Bird” (d. Andrea Arnold, U.K., 2024)
- “Blink” (d. Daniel Roher, Edmund Stenson, U.S.-Canada, 2024)
- “Carville: Winning is Everything, Stupid!” (d. Matt Tyrnauer, U.S., 2024)
- “Conclave” (d. Edward Berger, U.K., 2024)
- “Disclaimer” (d. Alfonso Cuarón, U.K.-U.S., 2024)
- “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight” (d. Embeth Davidtz, South Africa, 2024)
- “Emilia Pérez” (d. Jacques Audiard, France, 2024)
- “In Waves and War” (d. Bonni Cohen, Jon Shenk, U.S., 2024)
- “Jean Cocteau” (d. Lisa Immordino Vreeland, U.S., 2024)
- “Leonardo Da Vinci” (d. Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, David McMahon, U.S., 2024)
- “Maria” (d. Pablo Larraín, Germany-Italy-U.S.-Hungary-France-Greece, 2024)
- “Martha” (d. R.J. Cutler, U.S., 2024)
- “Memoir of a Snail” (d. Adam Elliot, Australia, 2024)
- “Misericordia” (d. Alain Guiraudie, France-Spain-Portugal, 2024)
- “Nickel Boys” (d. RaMell Ross, U.S., 2024)
- “No Other Land” (d. Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Ballal, Rachel Szor, Palestine-Norway, 2024)
- “One to One: John & Yoko” (d. Kevin Macdonald, U.K., 2024)
- “Piece by Piece” (d. Morgan Neville, U.S., 2024)
- “Santosh” (d. Sandhya Suri, U.K.-Germany-France, 2024)
- “Saturday Night” (d. Jason Reitman, U.S., 2024)
- “Separated” (d. Errol Morris, U.S., 2024)
- “September 5” (d. Tim Fehlbaum, Germany, 2024)
- “Social Studies” (d. Lauren Greenfield, U.S., 2024)
- “The End” (d. Joshua Oppenheimer, Ireland-Germany-Italy-Sweden-Denmark-U.K., 2024)
- “The Friend” (d. David Siegel, Scott McGehee, U.S., 2024)
- “The Outrun” (d. Nora Fingscheidt, U.K.-Germany, 2024)
- “The Piano Lesson” (d. Malcolm Washington, U.S., 2024)
- “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” (d. Mohammad Rasoulof, Germany-France-Iran, 2024)
- “The White House Effect” (d. Bonni Cohen, Jon Shenk, Pedro Kos, U.S., 2024)
- “Will & Harper” (d. Josh Greenbaum, U.S., 2024)
- “Zurawski v Texas” (d. Maisie Crow, Abbie Perrault, U.S., 2024)
The following short films will screen in the main program: “A Swim Lesson” (d. Rashida Jones, Will McCormack, U.S., 2024), “Alok” (d. Alex Hedison, U.S., 2024), and “The Turnaround” (d. Kyle Thrash, Ben Proudfoot, U.S., 2024).
Kenneth Lonergan, this year’s festival Guest Director, serves as a collaborator in the festival’s programming decisions, bringing new ideas and overlooked films. Lonergan presents the following film selections: “Arch of Triumph” (d. Lewis Milestone, U.S., 1948), “Barry Lyndon” (d. Stanley Kubrick, U.K.-U.S., 1975), “Doctor Zhivago” (d. David Lean, U.K.-Italy-U.S., 1965), “Grand Hotel” (d. Edmund Goulding, U.S., 1932), and “My Darling Clementine” (d. John Ford, U.S., 1946).
TFF annually celebrates a hero of cinema which preserves, honors, and presents important, meaningful films. This year’s Special Medallion award goes to French film company Les Films du Losange (with “Misericordia”). Special Screenings and Festivities include: “Beauty and the Beast” (d. Jean Cocteau, France, 1946); “Charles, Dead or Alive” (d. Alain Tanner, Switzerland, 1969) presented by Alfonso Cuarón; “Fly” (d. Christina Clusiau, Shaul Schwarz, U.S., 2024); “Hindle Wakes” (d. Maurice Elvey, U.K., 1927) with live musical accompaniment by Donald Sosin; “Prince of Broadway” (d. Sean Baker, U.S., 2008).
The SHOW Poster Gallery, a collection of curated posters representing the rich history of films played at TFF, curated by MUBI and Posteritati; Elizabeth Cook: A Solo Performance; Poster Signing with Luke Dorman; Audi Drive Experiences, and The SHOW App, sponsored by Criterion. Backlot, Telluride’s screening room featuring behind-the-scenes movies and portraits of artists, musicians and filmmakers will screen the following programs, all free and open to the public:
- “A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things” (d. Mark Cousins, U.K., 2024)
- “¡Casa Bonita mi Amor!” (d. Arthur Bradford, U.S., 2024)
- “Chain Reactions” (d. Alexandre O. Philippe, U.S., 2024)
- “Her Name Was Moviola” (d. Howard Berry, U.K., 2024)
- “Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger” (d. David Hinton, U.K., 2024)
- “Nobu” (d. Matt Tyrnauer, U.S., 2024)
- “Riefenstahl” (d. Andres Veiel, Germany, 2024)
- “The Easy Kind” (d. Katy Chevigny, U.S., 2024)
- “The Hexagonal Hive and a Mouse in a Maze” (d. Tilda Swinton, Bartek Dziadosz, U.K., 2024)
- “The Swallow” (d. Tadhg O’Sullivan, Ireland, 2024)
