Culture

2011 Mountainfilm in Telluride: Judith Selby Lang & Richard Lang

[click "Play" to hear Susan's conversation with Judith and Richard]

 

kicker: trash to treasure

October 5, 2010, the Town of Telluride passed an ordinance against single-use plastic shopping bags, making Telluride the first community in the state of Colorado to pass such a ban. 

The ordinance followed the popularity of the film "Bag It," made by Telluride local Suzan Beraza. "Bag It," which screened on National Public Television in April and garnered awards  at film festivals across the country, became as much a call-to-action as a documentary, not just locally, but nationally.

"Bag It" is  just one of a number of populist responses to another film, the Sixties pop phenomenon "The Graduate," a movie that predicted a future of plastics. Artists Judith Selby Lang and Richard Lang's work represents another kind of response. They make "found art."

"Shakespeare High": Telluride Mountainfilm's "Rocky"

[click "Play" to hear Susan's conversation with Tosh and Oscar]

 

Like the Telluride Film Festival, Mountainfilm in Telluride vets hundreds of movies submitted by hopeful directors from across the globe to select the best of the best to screen at its annual event. This year, festival director David Holbrooke whittled down the number of picks to about 60 features, including "Shakespeare High."

"Shakespeare High" is a feature-length documentary that tells the story of a socio-economic cross-section of teens in Southern California who study Shakespeare to compete in a drama festival run by the many thousand-strong volunteer teacher organization, DTASC (Drama Teachers Association of Southern California). The Festival, now 90 years old, counts among its alumnae Val Kilmer, Richard Dreyfuss, Mare Winningham, Sally Field, Nicolas Cage and Kevin Spacey. Spacey is also an executive producer (through Trigger Street) of the film.

2011 Mountainfilm in Telluride: Laura Antrim Caskey

[click "Play", Susan speaks with Laura Antrim Caskey]

 

 

Laura Antrim Caskey is a photojournalist now living in Rock Creek, West Virginia. Rock Creek is also the home of Appalachia Watch, a grassroots nonprofit group Antrim started in 2006 to focus on the environmental costs of mountaintop removal coal mining.

In April 2011, Antrim became one of eight winners of The Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights' 43rd Annual Journalism Award for "Dragline," a photographic exposé of mountaintop removal coal mining and the campaign to end the practice. 

Currently Laura Antrim Caskey is the West Virginia correspondent at Bag News Notes. She is also the poster artist for the 33rd annual Mountainfilm in Telluride. Her image is also on the program for 2011. An exhibition of her work is scheduled to hang at the Telluride Conference Center in Mountain Village, "Appalachia: A Land and People Under Threat."

2011 Mountainfilm in Telluride: Paul Colangelo photographer

[click "Play" to listen to Paul Colangelo's conversation with Susan]  

Each year, Mountainfilm in Telluride hands out a Commitment Grant. The award is designed to help creative individuals tell important stories in keeping with the spirit of the event: they are about "Celebrating Indomitable Spirits," the theme of Mountainfilm, and turning Awareness into Action, the motto for 2011 and a running subtext of the event.

Mountainfilm's Commitment Grant goes to filmmakers, artists, adventurers and photographers whose projects are designed to have a positive and tangible effect on vital issues concerning people, places and ideas under siege some place on the map. Photographer Paul Colangelo received one of five $5,000 grants handed out last year. The grant was for Paul's photographic exposition entitled "Sacred Headwaters, Sacred Journey" about the shared birthplace of three of British Columbia’s great salmon-bearing rivers, the Stikine, Skeena and Nass.

2011 Mountainfilm in Telluride: Mountaineer Jake Norton and Challenge 21

[click "Play" to hear Jesse's interview with Jake Norton and Wende Valentine]

 

 

by J James McTigue

Jake Norton is an Eddie Bauer First Ascent athlete and world-renowned climber, photographer and guide. He has a list of accolades as tall as Everest, a mountain he has attempted six times and summitted three. His career has taken him to the top of the world’s highest mountains and on explorations across the globe. His newest endeavor is Challenge 21, a campaign to climb 21 peaks, raise 2.1 million dollars and get 2.1 million people involved in clean water initiatives around the world. 

He will be a guest judge for the Charlie Fowler Award at this year’s Mountainfilm in Telluride and a presenter at the Saturday morning coffee talks to discuss climbing the second highest peak in the world, K2. Norton speaks passionately of mountains, but more so of the impact they have had on him.

2011Mountainfilm in Telluride: Wade Davis Returns to Telluride

Wade Davis is a fixture at Mountainfilm in Telluride and that's a good thing.

Telluride Inside... and Out interviewed Davis in 1997 on his first ever visit to Mountainfilm in Telluride, the town he took by storm. His subject at the time was his then latest book, One River, a tribute to the life and work of one of his mentors, the legendary explorer/botanist Richard Evan Schultes, about the discoveries Davis and protege Tim Plowman made on their odyssey through the Amazonian jungle in the mid-1970s. Since then, there have been many other books and many miles traveled. With Davis, the sky's the limit. Well, maybe not. The man is unstoppable.