Location | Telluride, Colorado, US |
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Language | International |
Website | www |
The Telluride Film Festival is a film festival in Telluride, Colorado, U.S., over Labor Day Weekend in September of each year.
It was started in 1974 by Bill and Stella Pence, Tom Luddy, and James Card and the Telluride Council for the Arts and Humanities, known now as Telluride Arts, who organized and sponsored the event, held the poster contest, presented the honorees symposium in the Town Park on Main Street, and the student symposium led by TCAH Chairman, Scott Brown.. It is operated by the National Film Preserve.
In 2007 the Pences retired. Julie Huntsinger and Gary Meyer were hired to run the festival with Tom Luddy. Huntsinger is Executive Director.
In 2013 the festival celebrated its 40th Anniversary with a new venue, the Werner Herzog Theatre and an extra day.
The bulk of the program is made up of new films, and there is an informal tradition that new films must be shown for the first time in North America to be eligible for the festival. Telluride is well-situated on the international film festival calendar for this: shortly after the Cannes Film Festival, but just before the Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival. This insistence on premieres has led to Telluride's being associated with the discovery of a number of important new films and filmmakers. This is especially true of Michael Moore (whose first film Roger and Me showed there for the first time in 1989) and Robert Rodriguez (whose first feature El Mariachi got its first festival screening there in 1992). The festival has also had the American premiere of films such as My Dinner With Andre (Louis Malle, 1981), Stranger than Paradise (Jim Jarmusch, 1984), Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986), The Civil War (Ken Burns, 1990), The Crying Game (Neil Jordan, 1992), Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001), Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005), The Imitation Game (Morten Tyldum, 2014) and Sully (Clint Eastwood, 2016).