The first test is getting to Telluride. The festival is held in a box canyon, and there isn’t a direct flight from Los Angeles or New York. After flying into Montrose or Durango, you spend an hour or more driving through mountain switchbacks, where the air becomes significantly thinner and the elevation rises until your ears burst. The town itself is small enough that you could walk around it in twenty minutes. There are Victorian shops, a main street that ends at a mountain face, screens installed in historic theaters and converted gymnasiums, and an outdoor venue at nine thousand feet where you can watch movies under a sky that darkens in a unique way at that altitude. It’s not practical. That’s the idea.
The Telluride Film Festival is one of the oldest in the nation and has been going on since 1974, making it older than Sundance. Compared to the model that most large festivals have adopted, it was constructed on a different set of presumptions. No prizes. There are no single-ticket sales; you must purchase a pass in order to attend. There is no stated lineup because the titles are kept a secret until the festival begins on Thursday. As a result, critics and prominent members of the business who are traveling there are unaware of what they will watch until they get there. They are aware that the films will be worth the trip and that the programmers have made thoughtful selections. That’s sufficient.
Even while the festival itself views the Oscar link as accidental, it has become the festival’s distinguishing characteristic for the outside world. The performance history is quite impressive. Telluride hosted the premiere of 12 Years a Slave. Telluride hosted the premiere of Moonlight. Oppenheimer, La La Land, Roma, Nomadland, Tár, and Lady Bird. Twelve of the previous fifteen Best Picture candidates or winners that ran as high-end fall releases either made their Telluride debuts before moving on to other venues. Studios actively work to get their pictures in front of Telluride’s programmers because they know that a positive response there will result in the kind of critical word-of-mouth that money cannot directly purchase.
Telluride creates a particular kind of attention that other festivals do not. The pass system restricts the number of attendees to about 5,000, including filmmakers, critics, serious moviegoers, a few business leaders, and actors and directors who attend to take part rather than advertise. In the traditional sense, there are no red carpets. The director of the movie you just saw may be seated three rows behind you. After the show, they will move to the front and spend forty-five minutes answering questions because the crowd is genuinely interested in their responses. Filmmakers who have regularly attended characterize it as the professional industry’s closest approach to a collegiate film seminar. That’s a big deal. Movies screened in that setting are discussed in a different way.
This is amplified by the hidden lineup. Before anyone sits down in a theater at Cannes or Venice, the audience’s expectations are shaped by months of reportage. There is no pre-conditioning in Telluride. A movie shows up as it is. It is not until that morning that a critic who has been following a director’s career comes upon their latest effort. As a result, the word-of-mouth that spreads from Telluride to the rest of the industry provides a more accurate assessment of the real reaction to the movie rather than whether it lived up to expectations based on a press release or trailer.
Mechanically, the festival’s timing in relation to Toronto is also important. On Monday of the Labor Day weekend, Telluride comes to a close. Thursday of the same week is when TIFF starts. Four days later, when critics have already formed views and written preliminary pieces, movies that create a lot of excitement in the Colorado mountains on Saturday afternoon may be the most talked-about titles in Toronto. The conversation is already heated when it gets to Toronto. Before their theatrical release campaigns ever officially start, studios that properly position their pictures through this sequencing gain weeks of earned media momentum.
