★ Telluride Film Festival

01Lý do quan trọng

Its influence is out of all proportion to its size, and the reason is timing. Falling on Labor Day weekend, Telluride sits between Venice and Toronto and is the first American showing of most of the autumn's serious films. A festival historian's summary is that early buzz at Telluride “opens the fall season of North American award speculation” that ends at the Oscars, and the trade press reports from the canyon accordingly. Distributors bring films here precisely because the audience is small, attentive and disproportionately made up of people whose opinion circulates.

The absence of a competition is the second reason. With no prize to win and no market to work, the weekend's currency is conversation: filmmakers sit in the same queues as pass-holders, the Q&As run long, and the tributes are genuine retrospectives rather than promotional appearances. In our reading Telluride is the best-designed film festival in the world and the hardest to attend — not because of any velvet rope, but because a town of a few thousand beds in a canyon cannot be made bigger, and that constraint is what produces the experience.

02Tuần lễ xung quanh sự kiện

For four days the town is the festival and nothing else. Colorado Avenue, the single main street, carries the queues; the free gondola between Telluride and Mountain Village runs at capacity and becomes the festival's main corridor; the town park, the courthouse and several commercial buildings are converted into screening rooms or festival offices. Labor Day weekend is also the end of the Colorado high-country summer, so the hiking and biking season is still open, the aspens are beginning to turn, and the ski-season infrastructure is running for the first time since spring.

The festival does not spill outward because there is nowhere for it to spill. What follows it does: the After Telluride Film Festival keeps the conference centre screening into the following week, and then the town empties. Anyone arriving the Tuesday after the holiday finds a quiet mountain town with the year's best films still playing at the conference centre and no queue.

03Thời điểm đến

Arrive Thursday. The festival opens on the Friday, the road in is long from every direction, and the altitude argues for a night's acclimatization before a fourteen-hour day of screenings. Leave Tuesday rather than Monday night — the Monday holiday carries the closing programme and the departure crush through Montrose and Telluride airports is the worst travel of the weekend. Anyone who cannot get a pass should consider the following week and the After Telluride run instead.

04Nơi lưu trú

There are three choices and almost no slack in any of them. In town, the hotels and inns along and just off Colorado Avenue put you within walking distance of every venue and are taken a year ahead, substantially by people who come annually. Mountain Village, above the town and connected by the free gondola, has the larger modern hotels and condominium stock and is the practical option; the gondola runs late and the ride is ten to fifteen minutes. The third route is a rented condominium or house, shared, which is how a large share of the festival actually sleeps. Beyond that the nearest real alternatives are Ridgway and Ouray, forty-five minutes to an hour and a quarter away over mountain roads, or Montrose, further still — all of which mean driving at night in the mountains.

05Tiếp cận và tiếp đón

Telluride sells passes rather than tickets to individual films, in a tiered structure published on its own site each summer, and the higher tiers carry earlier entry to the queues, which is the thing that actually determines what you get to see. Lower tiers and single-show tickets exist, and a locals' and students' programme gives Colorado residents and young attendees a route in. Pass numbers are capped by the size of the town, and the upper tiers sell out well before the festival. The festival publishes no corporate hospitality programme and its sponsor presence is deliberately restrained compared with festivals of similar standing. The After Telluride Film Festival, which follows the main weekend at the conference centre, is the only part of the operation sold at the door.

06Nơi diễn ra các hoạt động giao lưu

One street and one gondola. Colorado Avenue between Oak and Pine is where the queues form, where people eat between screenings, and where most of the weekend's conversation happens; the bars and restaurants along it are open to anyone and full from noon. The town park at the western end takes outdoor programming and the free open-air element of the festival. The gondola cabins are, genuinely, where a good deal of the festival's talking is done, because everyone shares them. In Mountain Village, the plaza around the conference centre and the hotel bars take the late crowd. Sponsor and distributor receptions exist but the scale is modest and the venues are the same restaurants everyone else is in.

07Hướng dẫn di chuyển

08Thông tin thực tiễn

09Lịch sử

The festival was founded in 1974 by Bill and Stella Pence, Tom Luddy and James Card, three of them with archival and repertory backgrounds, which explains the programming instinct: restorations and tributes have always sat alongside new work. It runs under the National Film Preserve, a nonprofit, and the preservationist framing has never left it.

Telluride itself was a declining silver-mining town when the festival arrived; the ski area and the festival together remade its economy. The festival's own capacity grew slowly and deliberately, and the two structural additions that mattered were the conversion of the Sheridan Opera House into a year-round venue and the building of the Werner Herzog Theatre for the fortieth anniversary in 2013, which finally gave the festival a large house. Its reputation as an awards-season launch pad is a more recent development, built over the past two decades as American distributors realized what a North American premiere in front of this particular audience was worth.

10Ai có mặt ở đây

Filmmakers, editors, cinematographers and archivists, many of whom return annually; American distributors and specialty-division executives; critics and the awards-season trade press in concentrated numbers; festival programmers from Toronto, New York and London; a long-standing body of pass-holders who are simply serious filmgoers rather than industry; and Colorado residents attending on the local programme. The mix is less commercial and more craft-weighted than at any other festival of comparable influence.