Case in point: Actress Amy Adams returns home to Colorado as one of Telluride’s three tribute recipients. The Castle Rock-raised actress arrives to the stunning, box canyon town with “Arrival.” In Canadian director Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi drama, she portrays a linguist called in to attempt to communicate with extraterrestrials. Like tribute colleagues Casey Affleck and director Pablo Larraín, Adams will attend presentations that include a clip reel, an on-stage interview, and a screening of her latest film. Highlights sure to make the clip reel: moments from her Oscar-nominated supporting roles in “Junebug,” “Doubt,” “The Fighter,” and “The Master”; and her Oscar-nominated lead performance as the likable swindler Sydney Prosser in “American Hustle.”
“’American Hustle’ was the film where I fell for her all the way,” admits Telluride co-director Julie Huntsinger, who, along with fest co-founder Tom Luddy, puts the fantastic beast together each year. “When you see her in ‘Arrival,’ itap soul-bearing. She’s not playing the cute, feisty girl. Itap the most natural performance of depth we’ve seen.”
As for the sci-fi drama’s director, Villeneuve is no stranger to Telluride (“Incendies” “Prisoners”). The Canadian director makes smartly visceral yet visually handsome dramas that are emotionally timely but never ham-fisted. “Denis is another one that there isn’t a lot of drama around him as a person,” says Huntsinger. “How cool is it that so much creativity is regularly coming from seemingly healthy people?”
Telluride likes its drama up on screen. Even with the likes of recent guests Meryl Streep, Brad Pitt, and George Clooney, the four-day gathering is low-key by paparazzi standards. No red carpets. Parties tend to be dinner or cocktail affairs. Gawking runs respectful. There is a long-time pact between programmers and fest-goers that Cinema — cap “C” please — and its artists are the point.
“I hope people do what we hope they’ll do,” says Huntsinger. Itap particularly important this year because there are more unexpected gems people need to pay attention to. The obvious has become so obvious.” (Want more on the gems? Head to this week’s “Reaction Shot” episode.)
Of course, at Telluride, even “the obvious” (by festival-circuit measure) can offer deep pleasures. Maren Ade’s “Toni Erdmann” — so heralded after its premiere at May’s Cannes Film Festival — may fall into that category. The director took inspiration from the late comic Andy Kaufman for her daughter-father dramedy.
So might Gianfranco Rosi’s “Fire at Sea.” Winner of the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival earlier in the year, the documentary focuses on the inhabitants of the Italian island of Lampedusa and the refugee/immigrant crisis.
“There’s this odd disconnect of Italian folks going about their daily lives on this tiny, remote island butting up against this massively important world topic at their shores. Do they care? Don’t they care? Is there anything anybody can do?” says Huntsinger. “He doesn’t specifically pose these questions, but you think about them. Itap a very quiet film.”
Telluride has always offered a reprieve from the movie industry’s summer cacophony. Though the festival finds itself smack dab in the midst of the different, increasingly loud buzz generated by the cottage industry of Oscar season prognosticating. For instance, the December release “La La Land” will be jetting its way from the Venice Film Festival to Colorado’s San Juans. Damien Chazelle’s musical stars Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling who sing and hoof and, if the news out of Italy is spot on — captivate. “La La Land” received a ga-ga-land reception from critics at a press screen before it launched the Italian fest. Venice, along with Telluride and the Toronto International Film Festival, all provide fodder for fall’s award season campaigns and handicapping.
Still, this feels like a byproduct of Telluride’s steady course, not its aim. Last year, fest-goers had to read the program book’s fine print to know that Streep would be in town in support of “Suffragette.” This year, careful readers will take note that Tom Hanks will be in attendance for “Sully,” Clint Eastwood’s soon-to-open drama about Chelsey “Sully” Sullenberger, the pilot responsible for landing a passenger jet on the Hudson River. The feat was dubbed “The Miracle on the Hudson.” Itap a star-laden studio picture, made by and cast with artists who get the festival’s mission.
Telluride fest-goers tend to be repeat offenders. So, too, the filmmakers. Itap a love thing. Recent fest honoree Volker Schlöndorff dons the mantle of guest director this year. Among the five movies he’s chosen: Joseph Mankiewicz’s “The Barefoot Countessa” (1954). “I was 16 when I first saw it in my hometown of Wiesbaden, and it caused a fight with my best friend,” Mankiewicz says in the program notes. “He loved it and I thought it was total kitsch. Kitsch or not, Ava Gardner, with her shoes off, haunted me into my 30s.”
Errol Morris (“Fog of War”) returns with “B Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography,” about the artist, now 79, who took portraits with a large-format Polaroid camera. The astoundingly prolific Werner Herzog (who has one of the festival’s best venues, a repurposed ice hockey rink named for him, will screen “Into the Inferno.” (Currently “Lo and Behold: Reveries of a Connected World,” his rumination on the good, the sad, the ugly of information technology, is onscreen at the Chez Artiste.) “Into the Inferno” finds the unquenchably curious filmmaker wrestling with the violent, generative mysteries of volcanos.
“Moonlight,” Jenkins’ long-awaited sophomore feature, screens at Telluride before heading to fall’s New York Film Festival. Adapting Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play, “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue,” Jenkins has made a coming-of-age, gay sexual awakening drama set in Miami during the so-called war on drugs.
“The message of the film, the quality of the film, the cast, itap such a knockout,” says Huntsinger, sounding not unlike a mother. “This is the film I want everyone to be talking about for the next six months,” says the programmer who knows the ways Telluride has ignited the conversation for so many films. “You watch; it’ll be one of those moments when people say ‘Remember when we saw “Moonlight” at Telluride?’ ”
