telluride film festival

When the 53rd Telluride Film Festival kicks off Friday high in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains, its lineup will span family rupture and sumo wrestling, AIDS and rock stardom, with films touching on astronomy, Rupert Murdoch and extraterrestrial biker gangs — a typically wide-ranging mix for a festival that likes to keep audiences guessing.

For festival director Julie Huntsinger, the films share less a theme than a feeling. “Tenderness is something that I see in a lot of the movies,” she says. “This is a very heartbreaking, tender year.”

Telluride’s intimacy is part of its peculiar power. Smaller and scruffier than the annual film events of Venice, Toronto or New York, the four-day festival has no competition or juried prizes and keeps its lineup secret until the last minute. Celebrities trade red-carpet formality for jeans and flannel, while audiences crisscross town between screenings in a high school auditorium, a Masonic lodge, the county courthouse and half a dozen other spaces pressed into service for the week.

For a festival that can feel this homespun, its awards-season footprint is remarkably large. Last year, five of the 10 eventual best picture Oscar nominees screened there: “Hamnet,” “Bugonia,” “Sentimental Value,” “The Secret Agent” and “Frankenstein.”

This year there are fewer obvious awards heavyweights in the mix, at a time when prestige and independent films have become harder to finance, distribute and sell to audiences. Then again, Telluride has never depended entirely on known quantities; films such as “Slumdog Millionaire” and “Moonlight” arrived with relatively modest expectations and left as major contenders.

“It’s such a quintessential Telluride lineup,” Huntsinger says of this year’s eclectic program. “They kind of always feel that way because they’re so handmade.”

Among the more than 40 films in Telluride’s main program are new works from major directors such as Martin McDonagh, Werner Herzog, Mike Leigh, Danny Boyle and Paweł Pawlikowski. This year’s Silver Medallion tributes — the festival’s signature career honorees — will go to filmmaker Andrew Haigh and actors Sandra Hüller and John Malkovich, who will make his first trip to Telluride.

John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell in Martin McDonagh’s “Wild Horse Nine”

(Diego Araya Corvalan / Searchlight Pictures)

Haigh, whose films include “All of Us Strangers,” “Lean on Pete” and “45 Years,” returns with “A Long Winter,” adapted from a Colm Tóibín novella and relocated from the Pyrenees to the American Rockies in the 1950s. Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Caitríona Balfe, Kit Connor and Fred Hechinger star as members of a struggling family that begins to unravel after the mother disappears.

Huntsinger calls Haigh deeply humanist. “I don’t know how Andrew is so skilled at getting these performances but that is truly his gift,” she says.

Malkovich comes to Telluride with the dark comedy “Wild Horse Nine,” the latest from McDonagh, writer-director of “The Banshees of Inisherin” and “In Bruges.” Malkovich and Sam Rockwell play veteran CIA operatives who, after helping destabilize Salvador Allende’s government in 1973 Chile, head to Easter Island on a more personal assignment.

“It’s my favorite thing that McDonagh has ever done,” Huntsinger says. “He’s quite incisive. It is a timely film. And Malkovich is extraordinary.”

Hüller returns after a breakout 2023 Telluride, where she brought both “Anatomy of a Fall” and “The Zone of Interest.” She has another two films in the lineup this year: Markus Schleinzer’s “Rose,” in which she plays a woman passing as a male soldier during Europe’s Thirty Years’ War, and Pawlikowski’s “Fatherland” as Erika Mann on a journey back to postwar Germany with her father, the author and Hitler critic Thomas Mann.

Huntsinger seems as taken with Hüller herself as with her artistry — “so much intelligence and compassion for human beings,” she says.

Sandra Hüller and Hanns Zischler in the movie “Fatherland.”

(Agata Grzybowska / Mubi)

Elsewhere, Ira Sachs’ “The Man I Love,” starring Rami Malek, Tom Sturridge and this year’s guest director Rebecca Hall, looks back at New York’s queer creative community during the AIDS crisis. In Simon Stone’s “Elsinore,” Andrew Scott plays “Chariots of Fire” star Ian Charleson, who took on the role of Hamlet at the National Theatre while dying of AIDS. Scott’s performance is already generating early awards-season attention.

Huntsinger hopes audiences won’t overlook Arthur Harari’s “The Unknown,” an uncanny body-swapping drama starring Léa Seydoux that uses its genre premise to explore questions of identity and selfhood. “It is really dense and obtuse but I think it is rewarding and I hope people take up the challenge,” she says.

Telluride has long emphasized nonfiction and this year is no exception. Among the higher-profile entries are “Pete Townshend: Behind Blue Eyes,” a portrait of the Who guitarist and songwriter, and Nanette Burstein’s “Carl Sagan: We Are Made of Star Stuff,” about the astronomer and science communicator. The slate also includes Bryan Fogel’s endurance-sports documentary “The Row”; Pegah Ahangarani’s Iran-focused “Rehearsals for a Revolution”; and Mark Cousins’ 16-hour “The Story of Documentary Film.”

“Everest: The Other Side,” from filmmakers Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, follows mountaineers Hilaree Nelson and Jim Morrison as they prepare to climb Everest’s north face and attempt an unprecedented ski descent. Chin and Vasarhelyi won an Oscar for 2018’s “Free Solo,” their nerve-shredding chronicle of Alex Honnold’s ropeless ascent up El Capitan.

Huntsinger calls the new film “an even more complex, emotional, deep and profound examination of what we call the call of the wild.” After seeing it, she says, she ran into Chin and blurted out, “I’m so glad you’re alive.”

The looming subject of artificial intelligence will also get its own moment in Telluride. A conversation called “The Humanity Dilemma” will examine what the festival calls the “species-level event” of AI’s rise and whether an AI-dominated future is inevitable. “I’m very worried about AI,” Huntsinger says.

For all the films Telluride has announced, the one that might generate the most chatter is still under wraps.

While Telluride routinely reserves “TBA” slots for popular repeat screenings, it has occasionally used them to spring an unannounced title on audiences — as it did last year with “Frankenstein.” This year it has set aside a prime Sunday night slot for just such a surprise: a world premiere involving, Huntsinger says, some “very known names.”

“Do not miss it,” she teases. “You just won’t see this one coming and your jaw will be on the ground for the entire length of the film.” Beyond that, Huntsinger falls back on the festival’s unofficial motto: “Underpromise, overdeliver.”

Inevitably, there will be guessing. One possibility is “The Social Reckoning,” a follow-up to “The Social Network” directed by its Oscar-winning screenwriter Aaron Sorkin. This one’s about Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen and Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz and stars Jeremy Strong, Mikey Madison and Jeremy Allen White. It’s due from Sony on Oct. 9. The film was still undergoing reshoots in mid-July.

Huntsinger volunteers one thing: The mystery film is not Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Digger,” a gonzo satire starring Tom Cruise, Hüller, Riz Ahmed, John Goodman and Jesse Plemons. She says Iñárritu — whose last film, “Bardo,” had a rocky reception on the 2022 festival circuit — was adamant that the decision wasn’t about avoiding festivals.

“As I understand it, there’s a big twist that he would like audiences to discover as close together as possible,” she says of “Digger,” which premieres in London Sept. 22 before opening Oct. 2.

Two of last year’s biggest Oscar contenders, “Sinners” and “One Battle After Another,” also skipped fall festival launches, raising questions about how essential such festivals — Telluride among them — remain to an awards campaign.

Huntsinger understands why a studio might hesitate to expose a film to scrutiny months before release. “The stain can happen if something gets savaged very far ahead of a release,” she says. “There’s a lot at stake.”

But she isn’t convinced the model is broken. She still believes the smaller, more challenging films Telluride tends to champion have “genuine shots” in the Oscar race.

“Getting selected is the prize,” Huntsinger says.

After all the strategizing and prognosticating, what no one can predict is which films will actually connect once audiences arrive.

“I don’t know what people are going to fall in love with,” Huntsinger says. “People have become like cats rather than dogs. You just never know what they’re going to go for.”