Telluride Film Festival
The Telluride Film Festival (TFF) is a film festival held annually in Telluride, Colorado, during Labor Day weekend (the first Monday in September). The 50th edition took place on August 31–September 4, 2023.
Not to be confused with Mountainfilm.Location
Style[edit]
As of 2015 the program was created by founder and artistic director Tom Luddy, executive director Julie Huntsinger and one of the Telluride Film Festival guest directors, who change each year. These have included Errol Morris, Peter Bogdanovich, Bertrand Tavernier, Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo, Peter Sellars, Stephen Sondheim, Buck Henry, and Michael Ondaatje.
Each year, an artist is selected to produce the poster art for the festival. Those who have accepted the commission include Chuck Jones, David Salle, Doug and Mike Starn, Dottie Attie, Jim Dine, Ed Ruscha, Francesco Clemente, Dave McKean, Gary Larson and Luke Dorman of Meow Wolf.[14] The sole requirement for the poster is that the word SHOW be featured. This is a tribute to a large illuminated sign which says "Show" and sits outside of the Sheridan Opera House, the festival venue where the Silver Medallions are awarded.
Reactions[edit]
Susan Sontag, in her 1974 essay "Fascinating Fascism", lamented that, "The purification of Leni Riefenstahl's reputation of its Nazi dross has been gathering momentum for some time, but it has reached some kind of climax this year, with Riefenstahl the guest of honor at a new cinéphile-controlled film festival held in the summer in Colorado...."[15]
After serving as guest director in 2001, Salman Rushdie wrote that, "It is extraordinarily exciting, in this age of the triumph of capitalism, to discover an event dedicated not to commerce but to love".[16]
Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times wrote in 2002 that "the hothouse filmocentric universe Telluride creates over a Labor Day weekend has always been more a religion than anything as ordinary as a festival, complete with messianic believers and agnostic scoffers."[17] Jeffrey Ruoff, a film historian at Dartmouth College, noted in 2015 that "Early buzz at Telluride opens the fall season of North American award speculation that climaxes with the Oscars."[18]