09 Sep TFF #53: We Could Not See Everything, But the SHOW Triumphed!
Presented by the National Film Preserve, the Telluride Film Festival (TFF) just brought the curtain down on the 53rd edition. And once again, about 60 feature films, shorts and revival programs, along with special artist Tributes, Conversations, Panels, Student Programs, and Festivities, including an appearance by YoYo Ma, wowed the crowd.
On the subject of the Telluride Film Festival, Bill Murray once summed up: “There are three things that are better than advertised: Groundhog Day, the Calgary Stampede – and the Telluride Film Festival.”
For more from Telluride Inside.. and Out on this celebration of the art, not the business, of film go here.
Ever get the feeling you are being watched? How many cameras caught you on your way to work today? How many companies tracked your buying habits on your lunch break? Did you remember to delete apps you are not using, since apps are hacker bait. Where exactly is all this information about you going?
Oh and do you check the headlines regularly? None of us seem to be able to help ourselves. That’s like trying to walk past the dead bodies in the road, but not being able to resist taking a peek. (See “Plato’s Republic.”) Paranoia does seem to be having a moment these days.
Which is why this is one year when the exercise of turning to the stranger sitting in the seat next to you could be regarded as a necessary, if mild antidote for what ails us.
And, as Variety noted: The lineup of TFF #53 gives off AI dread, exile, authoritarianism, and the ache of being alone together. A great summary of the prevailing winds. As far as it goes… But let’s give some heft to what was blowing in the wind by waxing specific about which varietal of paranoia was favored over Labor Day weekend.
A bit of history to clarify.
It could be argued that it was during the 1970s, especially here in the US, the issue of surveillance and privacy came into public focus for the first time. The decade’s political scandals increased awareness surrounding those issues to such an extent they quickly filtered into popular culture, especially cinema. For example, paranoia was the through line in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 “The Conversation”; in Alan J. Pakula’s “The Parallax View”; and Sydney Pollack’s “Three Days of the Condor.” The message: carpe diem, They or Them Are Watching!
What’s SHOWing on the mountain this year, however, was not just “They’re coming for me” but also “I can no longer verify what is true.”
And no place was that made more obvious than in the BIG TBA of the weekend: “You Can See Everything,” directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim.
(Yes, TFF director for 20 years now, Julie Huntsinger, actually risked programming a documentary as The Sneak. Though “You Can See Everything” is not really a doc. It is likely a form unto itself. Read on.)
What is now being described as an “A24 docudrama” is a brain teaser in which the media in general unanimously reports it is difficult to tell what everyone actually saw. And, based on what Fielder said at a Q&A, he himself still does not understand what was going on in front of his eyes – and camera.
The subject of this queer beast of a movie is a woman convicted of fraud and the filmmakers’ method in telling her tale is to give the audience just enough information to be able to weigh how reliable or well-supported a specific piece of information or belief is.
It all began when Elizabeth Holmes and her husband Bill Evans – heir to the Evans Hotel Group in San Diego – went looking for a documentary to tell their story to correct the record. The project landed at A24 with Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim attached. The couple granted full access. So “You Can See Everything” began as a commissioned rehabilitation, requested by the subjects themselves.
For those who have been living under a rock, Holmes had been convicted of defrauding investors in January 2022 and, when the filming began, was 34 days from reporting to a federal facility in Texas to begin an 11-year sentence. The crew camps out in San Diego and Fielder moves in with the couple and their two young children. Variety described this “home invasion” as a hangout movie, which is the mode Oppenheim has always worked in: domestic life inside a constructed reality, shot beautifully – but judgment suspended.
Yes and handing the judgy bit to the audience rather than telling us all where it’s at is why the two directors are so popular with their followers, which includes Millennials and the rest of the alphabet soup.
Why? Fielder and Oppenheim are known to take the audience’s side against whatever format. An entire generation grew up on reality TV knowing it was fake – but they watched anyway, with no one ever admitting the fix. In fact, Fielder’s whole method is to acknowledge the fix, then push it until it shatters like glass.
What’s more, Millennials and Gen Z grew up performing themselves continuously on platforms that reward sincerity – while pushing their limits. Fielder’s persona, the flat affect and what feels like excruciating pauses replete with long-glance looks, intensifies the drama, while never releasing the tension with a punchline. Fielder’s refusal to do so is the thing audiences find so honest and refreshing.
And Oppenheim said in one interview that it “all comes back to fantasy, unrequited dreams, people with blossoming inner lives they struggle to express, and that the filmmaking has to respond and inhabit it.” Younger viewers who live inside constructed environments and curated selves recognize that mandate instantly.
Bottom line: Fielder’s discomfort is engineered from within the frame. He is a participant. Oppenheim’s is achieved through style. He is an objective observer. Put them on the scene with Elizabeth Holmes, a woman convicted of presenting an unverified thing as verified, and you get a film that is very hard to define. That is the joke and the thesis.
But there’s a joke inside the joke. Huntsinger & Co. did what they could to keep title of this A24 project a deep, dark secret until the light in the house went off. Phones had been locked away while we were all on the line and had to remain in little baggies for the duration. The Festival imposed an information blackout on certain details of the film so verifiable information was not available on campus. And critics themselves have since been asking readers to go in blind.
Paranoia on parade, no?
What’s more, if the film and its crew is genuinely uncertain about what was going on in the Holmes household, then Holmes got what she paid for in access: a movie that did not and cannot convict her, but gives her plenty of branding for Theranos 2.0. (Yes, you read that right.) So it does not matter that she and hubby have not seen the release. Given the total lack of resolution then, is the subject of the project the directors’ intellectual and professional honesty or did the creative team act as a laundering service? Joke’s on them kind of thing?
At least for me the jury is out. We laughed along with everyone else in the house at the wild and crazy action on the screen – but also felt like we needed showers after being overexposed to two such toxic perps – urr – peeps.
Check out this full review in The Hollywood Reporter.
“You Can See Everything” is an interesting perversion of what’s true about the Telluride Film Festival – because you can’t see everything. #53 featured over 60 features, shorts and revival programs across four days, roughly 30 of which were new features.
And of course the Festival is not just about paranoia. There was a large retrospective documentary strand running through the weekend: Branagh’s theater history as told in his engaging doc, “Into the Breach”; Ken Burns turf; Pete Townshend, Avedon, Carl Sagan, Eleanor Coppola on her daughter, “Once Upon a Time in Harlem,” ”Everest.”
Another case in pauses that refreshed was the charming “Club Kid,” written, directed and starring the charismatic Jordan Firstman.
Firstman’s Peter, a Brooklyn party promoter, has outgrown a gnarly scene he can’t seem to leave. A 10-year-old son he never knew about arrives, played by the future star, Reggie Absolom. Everything that follows that outline boils down to the oldest structure in movies. Rolling Stone reported people were calling the film “A24 meets Big Daddy,” and Variety’s Guy Lodge described it as “a sweet, surprisingly old-fashioned heart-warmer.” IndieWire’s line was that Firstman finally sheds the ironic pose he’s held onto online for years and emerges as a sincere storyteller.
“Club Kid” has no verification problem. Nobody is concealing anything; nobody is being coached. And the boy is exactly who he appears to be. The tonal shift everyone praises isn’t dread giving way to relief. Deadline described “Club Kid” as an elegant switch into a more serious register that easily answers the questions we might have had about this man’s fitness to raise a child.
Bottom line: that’s comedy acquiring gravity, (not paranoia resolving). “Club Kid” is a brand spanking new fiction feature made by a young filmmaker over the same years as everything else we all saw. So, if the culture only produced suspicion and paranoia in 2024 and 2025, this project would not exist. But it does exist and it was one of the most loved things at Cannes.
And in Telluride.
There were clearly lots of films over Labor Day weekend about someone who lets a stranger into their space and is destroyed by that seemingly mundane gesture. Lucy married one. Rita befriended one. (See below for details.) And Holmes invited two in with cameras. A stranger arrives at Peter’s door and that saves him. Same premise; opposite outcome.
IndieWire’s take on “Club Kid” is that its director built a career on hyper-online irony, then made something openly and unapologetically sincere. Firstman himself told Variety the film doesn’t need to change the industry, that it’s a human story about a person going through a hard time and figuring out his life. Ergo while Fielder pushes irony until it breaks; Firstman drops it on its head with no apparent regrets.
In one Variety interview, Huntsinger pushed back on the doom reading, asking why comedies aren’t proliferating and insisting on jokes. The simple fact of life, however, is that she is known to book really good projects, but she can only pick what is on the shelf: in 2024 and 2025 filmmakers happen to be making films that reflect the zeitgeist, which these days finds many, if not most of us looking over our shoulders. Though clearly that is only part of the story, not the whole enchilada.
After all, Chris keeps a note in his pockets reminding him not to trust Lee. That’s the whole 1970s apparatus around paranoia miniaturized into a dying man’s coat.
Chris?
We are talking about the Chris in “Wild Horse 9,” of course, a wild success at TFF #53. The tense, existential buddy flick/spy movie was written and directed by Martin McDonagh. “Wild Horse 9” marks his return to storytelling.
Set in 1973, the bone dry script cycles around two aging CIA agents sent to Easter Island to prepare for the coup against Chilean president Salvador Allende. John Malkovich plays Chris, a veteran operative who has spent decades in the darkest shadows and was responsible for heinous acts. He is now heading into his final days. Of note: Chris was in Dallas the day Kennedy was shot. The film surprises with the why.
“Wild Horse 9” happens to be the only big project of the weekend that gives us both registers of paranoia at once.
The institutional layer is the 1970s version – except played straight. These aren’t men being watched by the agency. They are the agency, on the ground, setting the table for Pinochet’s banquet of horrors. That reverses the Coppola-Pakula-Pollack template: a paranoid thriller generally puts you with the surveilled little guy; instead McDonagh puts you in the front seat with the operators and asks you to just sit back and enjoy the company.
The intimate layer is the one that ties to the others films we’ve described. Chris, as mentioned, does carry a note in his pocket reminding him not to trust Lee. And the note is correct. But the friendship is also real. So there is no hostile force outside the frame, just the impossibility of verifying the person closest to you by a man who is literally losing the ability to verify anything.
AwardsWatch asks whether we really want to know who is taking care of us in a world this full of distrust. Rub that thought up against Lucy in “Gentle Monster,” against Rita and Ricki, against Fielder inside the Holmes household. Four films, same question.
“Wild Horse Nine” arrived in Telluride pre-anointed. The Venice world premiere drew a standing ovation of about 14 minutes: Malkovich visibly emotional; McDonagh and Rockwell reportedly out into the crowd shaking hands
Any opener sets the weekend’s temperature, and “Wild Horse 9′” set it on high. (As in Venice, the movie opened the SHOW in town for patrons and the press too with the same joyful outcome.) The Malkovich tribute doubled the impact of the cinematic love fest. The actor got the Silver Medallion Friday night to a standing ovation, with McDonagh, Buscemi, Di Girolamo and Broadbent in the house.
And why not? Malkovich’ narrative is irresistible.
He is 72 or 73 (depending on your source), with two award nominations, both more than 30 years ago – but so far no win. One read is that the Academy is likely to weigh his whole career. Malkovich’s own line at the Q&A was that he doesn’t think much about awards and isn’t in competition with colleagues. Exactly the posture that helps drive that bus home.
Also McDonagh brings automatic gravity. His “Three Billboards” took seven nominations, “Banshees” nine, and both launched from festivals.
(Note: Steve Buscemi – as MJ/Charlie – and Parker Posey as Lee’s wife on the phone received high marks for stealing scenes and adding emotional depth to the espionage narrative.)
In the Netflix project, “Gentle Monster,” Léa Seydoux is Lucy, a woman suspended in legal opacity, unable to learn where her husband’s crimes falls on the spectrum because the investigation about his alleged child abuse refuses to tell her. Paranoia as a structural condition, imposed by institutions – but experienced in a kitchen.
One detail we found interesting about the film is that most stories about sexual abuse take the victim’s POV or that of the perp, not “Gentle Monster,” which turns a lens on the partner. The story is based on a piece director Marie Kreutzer found in Die Zeit in 2020 about a large ring of pedophiles. She the math and concluded she must have known both victims and perpetrators back home, because statistically nothing else was possible. Her point: the offender coming your way is not necessarily a stranger in a van; he could be inside the household and/or your address book.
No one could or would argue the fact Séydoux was mesmerizing throughout, flashing a rainbow of emotions – fear, anger, denial, even and love which, though fractured, doesn’t just go away.
Séydoux thrills. But sadly “Gentle Monster” does not. The perp was neither gentle nor a monster. Which makes him a bit of an Average Joe, albeit one with a secret. That said, remember that Fielder and Oppenheim declined to convict Holmes just as Kreutzer declined to explain Philip. Audiences in town were split as to whether that is honesty or, as suggested in the dialog around “You Can See Everything,” simply laundering the true truth.
“The Liberation” is all about coercive control and therapy-speak weaponized. It is about a woman whose background opens the door to paranoia as her shadow.
Rita Cooper, early 1980s, suburban New Jersey. Forty-something, quietly depressed Holocaust survivor whose past has defined her and keeps surfacing privately in guilt-ridden ways.
Rita holds a monotonous desk job at a local bank. She has a husband named Reuben and two college-age daughters, Ella and Jo. The character is seen to lean on prescribed pills for stress and always has cigarettes in hand. An at-home father with dementia adds to her heavy load.
Turns out director Guy Nattiv’s own grandmother was Holocaust survivor who drifted from her husband and children under the influence of a woman 10 years her junior. The family only understood years after her death that what they had witnessed was a cult. Nattiv chose to withhold this key fact until a dedication and clip in the end credits.
Back to the story. Ricki, the spell-weaving, spell-binding cult leader, observes that Rita carries a lot of weight around. Her comment registers as the first time anyone has actually seen our protagonist. What follows is friendship and no-judgment sisterhood, but underneath the lovely window dressing was an exploitation of exactly the needs and fears Rita has never spoken about out loud.
The Playlist notes Nattiv deliberately includes scenes of the two of them genuinely enjoying each other, which is what makes the seduction land, rather than play as villainy.
Rita as we said drifts from her family and ends up at a commune in the woods, now renamed Naia. The contrast Variety noted is the spine of Coon’s brilliant performance: the domestic Rita is frazzled, hesitant, unsure of her place; the commune Naia dressed in muted florals and visibly, is serene and alarmingly docile and satisfied, even on a thin diet of plants.
Did the story fly in Telluride? You betcha. “The Liberation” is passionately empathetic and anchored by three outstanding performances: Carrie Coon as Rita/Naia; Lily James as Ricki; and Bella Ramsey as daughter Ella.
Coon is a slam dunk for a Best Actress nomination. The film’s world premiere played on Friday night at the Galaxy to a rapt, packed-to-the-rafters house as stated in this review in Deadline.
Even “The Debut” belongs in this category of films inspired by the zeitgeist. But at first glance that fact might seem counterintuitive.
Variety called “The Debut” “a Twilight Zone of ersatz Broadway.” A woman disappears into a role until she can’t locate herself. But what makes the argument about paranoia is the simple fact the person making her Debut is a mousy no-count named Mona, who gets cast (by default) in a play titled “Nosy Neighbor.” (Get it?) The show is about residents watching each other, and Moore plays the woman with keys to every apartment. Umm, argument made?
Please note that Mona and Rita (of “The Liberation”) are both New Jersey suburbanites who abandoned their families for a more authentic life under a charismatic, demanding leader. A coincidence we could not just leave on the table.
At one Q & A, writer-director Jesse Eisenberg said “The Debut” is autobiographical, that he did community theater and the people there made him feel special, just as happens to Mona.
One scene in particular does the most work for the raves. Giamatti’s Jerry pushing Mona/Moore in character to demand the rent. In response Moore dives into an escalating unhinged rant, Giamatti absorbing it.
Deadline reported that at the world premiere the audience laughed so hard they broke into sustained applause mid-scene. Not a normal thing for a drama-adjacent comedy
This register is new for the actress. Moore’s reputation rests on interior suffering: Todd Haynes, “Safe,” “Far From Heaven,” “Still Alice.” Comedy at this pitch is not where Moore has generally lived. Variety’s Gleiberman’s summary is that what holds the film together is Eisenberg’s voice and Moore’s astonishing performance…
Write on…
“The Only Living Pickpocket in New York” premiered at Sundance in January; Telluride is its fall bow. The Hollywood Reporter described the film as “a quiet knockout.”
We agree.
The lead, the veteran actor John Turturro, has waited 4o years for a first Oscar nomination and the rumor mill has it Sony Pictures Classics plans to push the overdue-veteran story. Under 90 minutes; Buscemi and Maslany in support. The film may be the best argument for not ousting the old boys in Congress cause they might actually know something.
Back to the story. Harry Lehman is a pickpocket, a profession that exists only in the gap where nobody is looking. In the opening sequence Harry lifts a wallet from a Wall Street guy on the subway, but the man doesn’t notice until he’s at a white-tablecloth lunch about to pay the bill. The interlude signals that the gap is Harry’s whole livelihood. A lifestyle gap that is closing because the film is set in the present in a city dominated by tech magnates, who don’t carry cash, just trackers.
So much for the old trades – like pickpocketing.
Sooner or later after several other mini heists, Harry lifts an other wallet, this one belonging to a boy named Dylan, who happens to be connected. He finds a USB card in the haul and he and a friend plug it in. That single act is what exposes our hero. Director Noah Segan makes a joke of that by suggesting Harry can’t even spell USB.
Structurally the moment is one of the sharpest, smartest and on point of the weekend: an analog thief survives 50 years by being unseen, touches a digital object just once, and is located immediately.
Nostalgia for the bad old days is not only Harry’s complaint: there’s an old-school detective being pushed aside for the clever kids in the cyber unit; a pawn shop fence; a crime matriarch adapting while missing the old days. Everyone in the film is being replaced by surveillance – even the cops.
Most movies on the TFF list are about a person who can’t verify what’s true. “Pickpocket” is about the last man whose trade depended on other people not looking, in a world that has finally solved the problem of not looking. Paranoia won, and this movie is the elegy for what that winning can cost.
Making the title also rhyme a bit with “Wildwood”: handmade craft, obsolete, mourned. (More on that below.)
And then we place in evidence for our thesis Rebecca Hall’s guest program. She chose “The Servant,” Joseph Losey’s masterpiece of domestic infiltration, and “Synecdoche, New York,” in which reality dissolves into a rehearsal that never ends.
A guest director’s six picks are the closest thing Telluride has to an editorial about the weekend. Hall’s reads as insinuation and unreality which leads to what? You said it: paranoia.
Back to “WildWood,” a thoroughly engaging, highly intelligent afternoon talk peppered with teasers from a stop-gap animation film based on Colin Meloy’s novel illustrated by Carson Ellis. The premise: a child is carried off into a wilderness adults can’t perceive.
Reconsider how Variety described the festival’s mood: AI dread, first on the list. TFF even ran a panel on the subject, “Filmmaking and Technology With Empathy.” Then in the middle of it all Laika put physical objects on a table. Puppets somebody carved. Sets somebody built. Faces that took a person a day to make so they could be photographed for a second and a half.
Our review is all about the Festival theme that highlight the collapse of verification. Nobody can tell what Fielder shot. Lucy can’t see what’s on her husband’s drives. Nattiv’s family couldn’t name what took their grandmother until decades after. And then a studio shows up with things you can look at from 18 inches away. The rationale? Someone actually made this, by hand, and you are invited to check out what authenticity looks like.
A 140-minute stop-motion feature, the longest ever made, at 24 frames a second, every frame a human being moving something a millimeter and stepping back. Nothing generated. Nothing that can be denied later.
For this project director Travis Knight, formerly an animator himself, brought in a live-action cinematographer, Caleb Dewchanel, the man who shot “The Black Stallion” and “The Right Stuff” and has six Oscar nominations.
The pitch at the panel was that Laika approached the puppets and sets as if they existed inside a live-action film. So the aesthetic project was and remains to make something entirely fabricated obey the physical laws of the real.
This was over a weekend when a documentary hired an actor to fill in some blanks in a doc and an animated film hired a live-action DP to make the artificial behave truthfully.
What a neat inversion.
And you saw it here first. The norm for Telluride and Julie, the face that launches a thousand fans and awards – and then some.
Once again, movie after movie at Telluride Film Festival hit that elusive sweet spot where we find compelling storytelling, confident filmmaking and escapist entertainment melding into something that resembles a chestnut-in-the-making.
Movie after movie held up a big, clear mirror to our tumultuous world, reminding us why those ribbons of dreams (thank you Orson Welles) mesmerize us as they do: to be reawakened to the to socio-cultural challenges like racism, misogyny/predatory behavior, crimes against The Other; to be reminded of our own foibles and flawed relationships, of our own driving desires, our own mortality.
But ultimately, to be enthralled.
Word on the Street from Trusted Sources:
Of course as we Could Not See Everything, so we chose to rely on the kindness of our friend circle to fill our blanks.
Their verdict?
Favorites were “Elsinore,” which we missed, along with“Wild Horse 9,” “Club Kid” and “The Debut.” “Fjord” was also described as a “must-see” as was “Bola Negra” and “Tenzing.”
Two friends,Industry insiders, had this to add:
“Elsinore” – Andrew Scott will win the best actor Oscar. Fantastic.
“The Debut” – Great Julianne Moore. Original and fun.
“Wild Horse 9” – Malkovich is terrific, Best Actor nomination.
“Ink” – Great editing, Rupert Murdock story.
“Bucking Fastard” – Doesn’t land the plane.
“The Unknown” – Not great. Doesn’t land the plane either.
“Alpha Gang.” Just dumb.
Obviously trust, but verify.
TFF films with clear distribution dates (as of this writing)
Missed TFF or some of the buzziest films? Here is a list of what’s coming out soon in distribution.
Has distribution:
• “Wild Horse 9″— Searchlight, November 6
• “The Debut” — A24, December 11
• “You Can See Everything” — A24, October (Deadline broke A24 as the buyer before the screening)
• “Club Kid” — A24, November 6 (bought at Cannes for $17M after a five-way war)
• “Elsinore” — Focus Features
• “Gentle Monster” — Netflix (acquired out of Cannes)
• “Ink “— Netflix
• “The Liberation” — Bleecker Street, January 8, 2027
• “Wildwood “— theatrical October 23.
Still seeking distribution, as of the close of the festival
• “Bucking Fastard” (Herzog, Kate and Rooney Mara) — the only film playing all four fall festivals, and still without a US distributor as of Gold Derby’s August scorecard
• “Alpha Gang” (the Zellners, with Bautista, Séydoux, Keough, Lily-Rose Depp, Bae Doona, Blanchett, Chris Pine) — on IndieWire’s hot sales list going in; The report is that critics were not generous and with good reason.
• “The Idiot(s)” — same, a sales title that didn’t land with critics.
• “The Man I Love” (Ira Sachs) — Canfield moderated the Q&A and reports it’s still out for acquisition despite warm Cannes reviews.
That’s all folks….
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