Festivals

Trailblazers+Sam, 2010
Red Knuckles & the Trailblazers,
plus Sam Bush, TBF 2010

It's always exciting to see the preliminary lineup for the coming year's Telluride Bluegrass Festival. As we go through the list we look for favorites returning, and performers we don't know so well making the list, maybe for the first time.

This year's early release is no different. Brian Eyster of Planet Bluegrass cautions that there will be additions to the list, but this is the TBF lineup as we know it now. Got your tickets yet?

Awareness into Action: Galamsey     Telluride locals David Byars and Jenny Jacobi left last year's Mountainfilm with the same inspiration and desire to do good that many take away from Telluride's film and philanthropy festival. Not wanting to lose this feeling, they began a serious...

IMG_2253 Five Mountainfilm in Telluride grantees, from a field of 75 filmmakers, photographers, and adventurers, each receive $5,000 and an Apple laptop computer to help with new projects that key into Mountainfilm’s mission to educate and inspire audiences about issues that matter. The grants are the first made under the new Mountainfilm Commitment initiative designed to help ensure that important stories are told – and heard.

“The projects we’re supporting with grants cover very diverse ground but we think each are really worthy, compelling and vital,” said Mountainfilm Executive Director Peter Kenworthy. “We were at real pains to narrow the field because we were presented with such outstanding applications. We think our top five choices reflect the kind of breadth, depth and excellence that Mountainfilm strives for in its programming. We couldn’t be more pleased or excited to be partnering with them.”

Minds of Mountainfilm - Tom Shadyac from Mountainfilm in Telluride on Vimeo.

 

 

This weekend, people enjoying the 2010 Mountainfilm program will be surrounded by skyscrapers instead of mountains—the film festival is screening some of its finest flicks in New York City at the Lincoln Center this Oct. 22-24, including Tom Shadyac's I Am and Reel Thing Productions' Bag It. Mountainfilm is also sharing its message about the extinction crisis (the festival's 2010 theme) by hosting a discussion with a panel of experts at the event.

Over the years, Mountainfilm in Telluride has evolved from its roots as a cinematic collection of outdoor adventures into something even more significant. Today, Mountainfilm offers a broader perspective on the world, a group of films, books and conversations by people who share a love for the natural world and a passion for protecting our place in it. The documentaries presented still portray the pioneering adventurers of the outdoors, but now films like I Am and Bag It also make another type of connection with audiences. They ask tough questions about how over-consumption and greed are affecting our world.

 

 

 

Above is a trailer from Ticked Off Trannies With Knives, another of the feature films set to screen at this weekend's Telluride Horror Show. This film made a big splash at the Tribeca Film Festival.The following is a continuation of yesterday's Q&A with festival director Ted Wilson. Read the first segment here.

Telluride Inside: Does the horror film industry have its own set of stars? Actors, screenwriters, producers?

Ted Wilson: If you’ve made a horror film that had an audience, you’ll always have a place in the horror world, even if you haven’t made a film in thirty years. The legends of horror never die and remain revered by fans forever. Wes Craven, John Carpenter, George Romero, Roger Corman, and on and on. We hope to have them all at the Horror Show some day!

 

 

 The excerpt above is from "The Translator," a film by Sonya Di Renzo, and one of the films selected for the Lunafest from the 600 or so entries the organization receives each year from aspiring women filmmakers. Women make less than 6 percent of the 250 top-grossing films in today's industry, and Lunafest offers a venue for women to break through and get their work seen.

These are not "chick flicks." The films that get selected and screened by Lunafest are created by women, about women and for women, but these are not saccharine romances with corny dialogue and predictable endings. This is cinema at its most powerful: great storytelling with compelling subjects and important messages, and above all, entertaining.

 

(Above is a trailer from Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, one of the feature films playing at the Oct. 15-17 Telluride Horror Show.)


One of my earliest childhood memories is of being shooed out of the TV room when the movie my aunt and uncle were watching turned really gory. I can vividly recall the scientist, whose arm had just been torn off by the monster he’d created, streaking blood across the wall as he died a slow, horrific, cinematic death. I don’t remember my first day of kindergarten or much else from those tender years, but that movie has stuck with me all this time.

Over the years, there were other things that contributed to my closet fascination with the horror genre: old Twilight Zone reruns, Stephen King novels, a masked Michael Myers lumbering after Jamie Lee Curtis in "Halloween." Scary movies are one of my guilty pleasures, but it’s always been hard to find someone to catch a flick with me. Until now.

Sunday flag I’ve been a fan of the Telluride Blues & Brews Festivals for years. I’ve actually watched the event morph from a few tasting tents on Colorado Avenue to a full-blown, internationally renowned music festival with some of the best musicians on the planet, fabulous microbrews and a venue that simply blows the socks off most other blues festivals - outside of New Orleans, that is. And the 2010 TB&BF was no exception. It was, in fact, one of the best ever.

  Graced with magnificent, cerulean blue skies, mountainsides of glowing, golden aspen and temperatures in the 80’s, the stage was set for a weekend of stellar performance, outrageous weather and ecstatic experience.  Thursday evening opened the festivities with a free sunset concert at the Mountain Village Plaza featuring the Gold Kings – a talented local band of “brothers” – followed by on-the-rise British blues guitarist Matt Schofield – wow!

[click "Play" for the continuation of Eric Moore's conversation about the Festival]

Knc The list of Year #1 participants in Eric Moore's brand new Telluride Photo Festival is impressive: The International League of Conservation Photographers is represented along with National Parks Magazine, Sigma Pro's Dave FitzSimmons, APhotoEditor.com's Rob Haggart, also former director of photography for Men's Journal and Outside. Ace Kvale, Bill Ellzey, Gordon Wiltsie, Kathleen Norris Cook, Robert Glenn Ketchum, Tim Kemple, and Tom Till, are also displaying their work.