Telluride Mushroom Festival: Louie Schwartzberg & “Fantastic Fungi”

12 Aug Telluride Mushroom Festival: Louie Schwartzberg & “Fantastic Fungi”

Telluride’s 38th annual Telluride Mushroom Festival takes place Thursday, August 16 – Sunday, August 19. The full schedule is here. Migrate around the site to find info on presenters, venues, book-signings etc. Or simply filter by topic or venue. Tickets/passes here. 

This year as every year, Tradd & Olga Cotter return with their mycobrews in association with the Telluride Brewing Company. The beer party launch is Wednesday, August 15, 8 p.m., at the Sheridan Opera House.

The Gondola Plaza Mushroom Extravaganza, formerly known as the Chef’s Cook-off, takes place Friday, August 17, noon, at Gondola Plaza. This year, Olga Cotter coordinates the event.

The Telluride Mushroom Festival parade, which takes place on Saturday, August 18, 4 p.m., is open to the general public. The over-the-top spectacle is not to be missed.

Award-winning filmmaker Louie Schwartzberg bring clips of his upcoming documentary,”Fantastic Fungi,” to the Telluride Mushroom Festival. For his presentation, Schwartzberg is paired with returning keynote speaker Paul Stamets for a program that takes place Thursday, August 16, 8 p.m., at the Sheridan Opera House.

Scroll down to listen to a podcast featuring the ground-breaking filmmaker.

And go here to watch the breathtaking trailer for “Fantastic Fungi.”

The egg of a butterfly.

The wings of a dragonfly.

A snail’s tongue.

Mites on our eyelashes.

The of a caterpillar.

The tongue of a snail.

The awesome flight of a fruit fly.

The globalized world of high-tech flight.

The aura the surrounds candles on a birthday cake revealed as a flash of color when we blow them out.

Through his signature time-lapse photography, award-winning filmmaker and world-famous TED talker Louie Schwartzberg animates the iconic chiasmus from Keats’ most famous ode: “On a Grecian Urn”: “Beauty is truth, truth is beauty,…”

The phrase is a catchall for the complexity of nature and the paradoxes inherent in all art.

For over three decades, the cinematographer, director and producer has been creating unforgettable images while becoming widely known as one of the industry’s most innovative artists. Schwartzberg’s work in the areas of 35mm time-lapse, high-speed and macro photography to create breathtaking and surprises glimpses into people and places – especially Mother Nature – are recognized around the globe.

In Schwartzberg’s luminous “Mysteries of the Unseen World,” (2014), for example, the slices of life ticked off above are revealed in their wonder, shots which pull back the curtain to reveal the beauty within the beasts, the beasts within great beauty and the truth of worlds otherwise too small, too fast, too slow, and too vast for us to see otherwise.

In his TED Talk in 2014, the opening frame of the clip from “Mysteries” showed the fruit of a fungi popping up through the earth, the awesome mushroom, the stars of Schwartzberg’s next triumph: “Fantastic Fungi.”

Clips from “Fantastic Fungi” will be shown on a program at the upcoming Telluride Mushroom Festival titled “Mushroom Movie Magic with Louie Schwartzberg,” Thursday, August 16, 8 p.m., the Sheridan Opera House.

The focus of Schwartzberg’s presentation is fungi in general, the film specifically and what goes into his mind-boggling time-lapse shots of mushrooms that grow so incredibly high. Joining him will be one of the weekend’s keynote speakers, Paul Stamets, a visionary emissary of the Kingdom of Fungi and a man with a plan – namely working with fungi to help Mother Nature and mankind. Stamets says it is high time for a paradigm shift:

‘We are now fully engaged in the 6th Major Extinction (“6 X”) on planet Earth. Our biosphere is quickly changing, eroding the life support systems that have allowed humans to ascend. Unless we put into action policies and technologies that can cause a course correction in the very near future, species diversity will continue to plummet, with humans not only being the primary cause, but one of the victims. What can we do? Fungi, particularly mushrooms, offer some powerful, practical solutions, which can be put into practice now.’

“I hope my films inspire and open people’s hearts. Beauty is nature’s tool for survival – you protect what you love. If I can move enough people on an emotional level, I hope we can achieve the shift in consciousness we need to sustain and celebrate life,” adds Schwartzberg.

More about Louis Schwartzberg:

Marco Tempest and EDI the Robot at TED2014 – The Next Chapter, Session 9 – Signals, March 17-21, 2014, Vancouver Convention Center, Vancouver, Canada. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Louie Schwartzberg is a cinematographer, director and producer whose career spans more than four decades of providing breathtaking imagery using his time-lapse, high-speed and macro cinematography techniques. Schwartzberg tells stories that celebrate life and reveal the mysteries and wisdom of nature, people and places.

Schwartzberg’s recent theatrical releases include the 3D IMAX film, “Mysteries of the Unseen World “with National Geographic, narrated by Forest Whitaker, and the documentary “Wings of Life” for Disneynature, narrated by Meryl Streep.

Schwartzberg also directed “Soarin’ Around the World,” an international update to the original “Soarin’ Ride” now showing at Disney Parks in Anaheim, Orlando and Shanghai.

Designed to inspire, educate and evolve our perspective on the world, Schwartzberg also creates and curates Moving Art videos, which can be found on your smart phone and on Netflix.

The Moving Art series was expanded from six to 13 videos in early 2017.

Schwartzberg’s “Gratitude Revealed” series of shorts was launched on Oprah.com. Supported by the Templeton Foundation, with science and analytics by the Greater Good Center at UC Berkeley, the series explores the multifaceted virtues of gratitude.

Louie Schwartzberg is the first filmmaker to be inducted into the Association for the Advancement of Science and the Lemelson Foundation’s Invention Ambassadors Program.