Telluride: Cinema’s Best and Bravest

The 27th Telluride Film Festival opened under a leaden Colorado sky last Friday and concluded on Monday bathed in the brilliant mountain sunshine glinting off the towering 14,000-foot igneous peaks of the Western San Juan mountains.

Over the years, Telluride has acquired an international reputation for its steadfast fealty to an ideal of cinema--free of the taint of the bottom line--under siege in a world in which commercial success is too often seen as synonymous with artistic value.

At a time when so many ostensibly commercial movies are devoted neither to convincing plot nor character, neither to language nor narrative, but rather only to the sheer velocity of image, Telluride is a kind of Bayreuth of cinema. Tom Luddy and Bill and Stella Pence, the festival’s founders and co-directors since 1974, remain wed to the notion that storytelling still matters and that movies can act, as Kafka once said of books, as “the ax that breaks up the frozen sea within us.”

Not only does it honor the deserving (if too often neglected) movie masters of the past, it also champions important, if largely unseen, work being created by young filmmakers all over the world.

In recent years, much of the best literature being written is the work of writers living far from the prosperous capitals of the First World. One thinks of writers from South America and East and Central Europe, the Middle East and the extraordinary burst of vivid fictions from Asia and the subcontinent of India. It is there, on the fault lines of history, where the collision of cultures provides fertile ground for the artistic imagination, where issues of life and death, love and hate, run deepest and erupt most vigorously and provocatively to the surface.

Thus, arguably, the best movie-making today is to be found far from Hollywood. Three programs at Telluride this year--”Filmmakers of Tomorrow,” “Calling Cards” and “Great Expectations”--showcased 16 short films done by promising movie-makers from countries as diverse as Bosnia, the Philippines and New Zealand. In addition, Peter Sellars organized a program dedicated to “New Visions of Indigenous Australia,” which offered an eye-opening look at aspects of a continent unlikely to be on view during the upcoming Olympic Games.

Tributes were given to Taiwanese director Ang Lee, the Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgard and Korea’s greatest living director, Im Kwon Taek, whose astonishing picture “Chunhyang,” based on a traditional Korean pansori, an epic sung ballad of love and betrayal, had some comparing it to the best of Akira Kurosawa.

With several dozen films squeezed into four days, it is impossible to see every film on offer. Thus, any account of the festival is inevitably partial. Hard choices must be made. One feels much as one imagines a World War I surgeon must have felt on the battlefield of Verdun: It’s triage every day.

Seeking Out the Edgy and the Neglected

Many festival-goers forsake fare that is likely to be released commercially, favoring instead movies that have yet to find distributors, or which are unlikely to be widely seen. Indeed, it is one of Telluride’s virtues that, unlike so many film festivals, it privileges the edgy and neglected over the obvious and mainstream. But neither does it raise to the level of dogma its recondite sensibility. It also honors accomplished and successful directors and actors who, against the odds, seek to craft original dramas and visually arresting movies.

Thus, this year, participants included such well-known actors as Al Pacino (whose film “Chinese Coffee” he directed from the play by Ira Lewis) and Danny Glover and Angela Bassett (whose performance in the late John Berry’s “Boesman and Lena,” based on the magnificent play by South African playwright Athol Fugard, had many viewers buzzing about a possible Oscar nomination for best actress). Such directors as Philip Kaufman (“The Right Stuff” and “The Incredible Lightness of Being,” among other films) and Paul Schrader (best known perhaps for his screenplay of Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver”) were also on hand.

Kaufman’s new film, “Quills,” is based on the Obie-winning off-Broadway play of the same name by Doug Wright. Loosely derived from the life of the Marquis de Sade, “Quills” is a fevered rumination on the power of the written word. It grapples with perennial issues of evil and good, tyranny and liberty and is, in the end, a movie about the pornography of power. Schrader’s “Forever Mine,” starring Joseph Fiennes, Gretchen Mol and Ray Liotta, owes much to the sensational melodramas of Douglas Sirk. Taking place in Florida and New York, it’s a cracked love story about the compulsion of desire.

The festival proved to be an embarrassment of riches. Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland’s “Aberdeen,” a festival favorite, is a gripping drama of alcoholism and the seductions of dysfunction. Starring Stellan Skarsgard, Lena Headey and Charlotte Rampling, the film, at the time of its showing in Telluride, had yet to find an American distributor.

Among other treasures was Liv Ullmann’s “Faithless,” her second feature based on a screenplay by Ingmar Bergman (1997’s “Private Confessions” was her first). Featuring Erland Josephson, who co-starred with Ullmann in Bergman’s 1974 “Scenes From a Marriage,” and actress Lena Endre, “Faithless” is about the cartography of obsession whose triumphs and failures are etched in the landscape of the faces of its remarkable actors. The movie’s cinematographer, Jorgen Persson, has shot the heart of the film almost entirely in close-ups. Stately, relentless, beautiful, it is a big grown-up movie made for adults.

It is risk-taking artists like these to whom Telluride gives special attention. Women filmmakers like Iranian director Shirin Neshat and Armenian director Garine Tourassian, for example, are among the new movie-makers bravely exploring what critic Rani Singh has called “the poetry of displacement.”

The Debut of a Major New Talent

The most striking exemplar of such explorers is Bahman Ghobadi. A 30-year-old former assistant to Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, Ghobadi stunned Telluride with his first feature film, “A Time for Drunken Horses.” Set in a harsh, mountainous area near the Iran-Iraq border in the Kurdish region of Iran, it is the heartbreaking near-Dickensian tale of five children whose mother dies in childbirth and whose father daily risks his life smuggling goods across the border. Haunting and unforgettable, it marks the debut of a major new talent. A film like this gives hope that the promise of movies as art will yet be fulfilled. Whether it can be sustained is another question.

It is one of the more puzzling paradoxes of globalization that as America’s economy is increasingly intertwined with those of countries the world over, much of its culture grows steadily more coarse, and more and more provincial. The pell-mell construction of gigantic multiplexes all over the country results in a land of more than 37,000 movie screens (up from the 28,000 screens of just five years ago), all competing to show the same two dozen movies released by Hollywood, while excellent films from elsewhere are unable to find distributors. And when they do, are unable to play long enough to build a meaningful audience.

Even such highly regarded directors as Barbet Schroeder, whose 1990 “Reversal of Fortune” was a hit, find it ever more challenging to create movies of both mass appeal and artistic integrity. A case in point is his “Our Lady of the Assassins,” based on the autobiographical novel of one of Colombia’s best writers, Fernando Vallejo, whose work has yet to be translated into English and published in the United States.

One of the most important new Latin American writers (Vallejo was born in 1942 and is himself a screenwriter and director, having made three films in Mexico, where he currently lives), Vallejo is famous in Colombia and Mexico, of course, and in France as well (where his writing has been compared to the best of Jean Genet’s) but is unknown in America.

Schroeder’s “Our Lady of the Assassins” takes place in Medellin, Colombia, where Schroeder spent four years of his childhood, from ages 6 to 10. It’s the story of a homosexual writer, possessed of a saturnine temperament, who, after living most of his life abroad, returns to his hometown to revisit the places of his youth. He falls in love with a young boy who packs a pistol but would sooner kill a stranger than an injured dog. It’s a courageous picture about the pathology of indifference, set against the backdrop of the narco-violence of the murder capital of South America.

It is films like this--brave and passionate--that make Telluride special. Like the fresh mountain air, they provide a kind of oxygen, renewing one’s faith in the idea that movies, like all great art, can still turn us inside out and make us see the world with fresh eyes.