Experience

Telluride reveals titles in its 36th edition

By Susan Gerhard

The Telluride Film Festival announced its full lineup for its 36th festival, which opens Friday, Sept. 4, and runs through Labor Day Weekend. Founded in 1974 by James Card, Tom Luddy and Bill and Stella Pence, the festival takes place in a mountain village in Colorado, and is currently programmed by directors Luddy and Gary Meyer and managing director Julie Huntsinger out of offices in Berkeley, California. The festival had already announced its Guest Director for 2009, Alexander Payne, and its special celebration of legendary film critic Manny Farber. Further tributes go to Margarethe von Trotta, Viggo Mortensen and Anouk Aimée. The festival offers 24 new features in its main program alongside its always strong revivals, as well as 29 shorts and 10 documentaries in its Backlot program, which focuses on filmmakers and other artists.

The festival breaks with tradition and opens at 2 p.m. on Friday with what it terms a "marathon" screening of Red Riding, a trilogy of films made for British TV by Revolution Films and Channel 4, and adapted from four novels written by David Peace and based in remote West Yorkshire. Lobster Films’ Serge Bromberg receives this year’s Special Medallion award, which honors a “hero” of cinema, at the program Retour de Flamme, Bromberg’s live cinema show. (Bromberg’s new film, Henri-Georges Clouzout’s Inferno plays in main program.)

Guest Director Payne presents three films from "Forgotten Hollywood:" Low-budget snow western 1959 Day of the Outlaw, 1950’s The Breaking Point, an adaptation of Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, and Leo McCarey’s other 1937 film (he won that year’s Oscar for The Awful Truth), Make Way for Tomorrow, and three other forgotten world treasures: 1963 Spanish satire El Verdugo, 1963 Japanese Daisan no Kagemusha, a more brutal version of the same story told by Akira Kurosawa in 1980, and Luciano Emmer’s 1952 Le Ragazze di Piazza di Spagna.

Other revivals include the Jean Renoir film Toni with Greil Marcus, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Kent Jones, Robert Polito, Robert Walsh and Patricia Patterson in person, a screening of Jacques Demy’s Lola for the Anouk Aimée tribute, which will also feature clips and onstage interviews with Los Angeles critic Scott Foundas and public radio’s Davia Nelson. The Pordenone Silent Film Festival presents 1929 Les Nouveaux Messieurs with original score by Stephen Horne.

Its Talking Heads series include live conversations between Michael Haneke and Scott Foundas, and Davia Nelson and Nicolas Cage, among others.

Films in the "Show" are:
A Prophet (Jacques Audiard, Germany/Austria/France, 2009)
An Education (Lone Sherfig, U.K., 2009)
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (Werner Herzog, U.S., 2009)
Bright Star (Jane Campion, U.K./Australia/France, 2009)
Coco Before Chanel (Anne Fontaine, France, 2009)
Farewell (Christian Carion, France, 2009)
Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, U.K., 2009)
Gigante (Adrián Biniez, Uruguay, 2009)
Henri-Georges Clouzout’s Inferno (Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea, France, 2009)
Life During Wartime (Todd Solondz, U.S., 2009)
London River (Rachid Bouchareb, U.K./France/Algeria, 2009)
Red Riding three-part series: 1974 (Julian Jarrold, U.K., 2009); 1980 (James Marsh, U.K., 2009); 1983 (Anand Tucker, U.K., 2009)
Room and a Half (Andrey Khrzhanovsky, Russia, 2009)
Samson & Delilah (Warwick Thornton, Australia, 2009)
Sleep Furiously (Gideon Koppel, U.K., 2007)
Terra Madre (Ermanno Olmi, Italy, 2009)
The Jazz Baroness (Hannah Rothschild, U.K. 2009)
The Last Station (Michael Hoffman, U.K., 2009)
The Miscreants of Taliwood (George Gittoes, Australia/Pakistan, 2009)
The Road (John Hillcoat, U.S., 2009)
The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke, Germany/Australia/France, 2009)
Vincere (Marco Bellocchio, Italy, 2009)
Vision (Margarethe von Trotta, Germany, 2009)
Window Buddhadeb Dasgupta, India, 2009)

Films in "Backlot" are:

14-18: The Noise and the Fury( Jean-Francois Delassus, France/Belgium, 2009)
1959: The Year that Changed Jazz Forever (Paul Bernays, U.K., 2009)
Against the Grain: The Film Legend of Bernhard Wicki (Elisabeth Endriss-Wicki, Germany, 2007)
Charlie Haden: Rambling Boy (Reto Caduff, U.K., 2009)
Cool (Anthony Wall, U.K., 2009)
Disco and Atomic War (Jaak Kilmi, Estonia/Finland, 2009)
It Came from Kuchar (Jennifer Kroot, U.S., 2009)
The Making of Samson & Delilah (Beck Cole, Australia, 2009) *Viet Harlan: In the Shadow of Jud Süss (Felix Moeller, Germany, 2009)
Waking Sleeping Beauty (Don Hahn, U.S., 2009)
We Who Lived "La Dolce Vita" (Gianfranco Mingozzi, Italy, 2009)

For more information, see Telluride.org.

topics: actors, art film, audiences, authors, awards, bay area, film festivals, french cinema, genre films, world cinema

09.03.2009