The Telluride Film Festival’s lineup, kept top secret until the day before the Colorado fest begins, has been revealed. It features, as usual, a handful of hotly anticipated premieres, some big Venice holdovers, and several promising documentaries.
The festival, which often debuts some of the biggest Oscar contenders of the season, runs September 2–5 this year, returning to its original four-day schedule after extending one day longer last year as a COVID-19 precaution. Telluride Film Festival executive director Julie Huntsinger tells Vanity Fair it will be back to its original form in more ways than one. “This year there’s so much that is challenging, that is in your face. I love it,” she says. “And so you’re going to see a more typical year in terms of how people interact with each other and talk about the movies—there will be fighting.”
What Huntsinger means by fighting is the passionate discussion that takes place—in line for the next movie, on the streets of Telluride, or in the bars and restaurants in town—among the movie-loving fest-goers. And there should be plenty to discuss and debate, as many of the films, including the four world premieres, feature timely topics embedded deep into their stories and captured with phenomenal performances.
One of the most hotly anticipated films is Women Talking, a drama directed by Sarah Polley, which will have its world premiere at the festival on Friday. The film focuses on a group of Mennonite women who, after discovering that they’ve been drugged and raped by some of the men in the community, gather together to decide what course of action to take. Frances McDormand, Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, and Jessie Buckley all star and will be on hand at the festival, as will Polley, who will be honored with one of the festival’s three tributes. “It’s so obvious that this is a collaborative, beautiful, transcendent effort by this group,” Huntsinger says. “And it’s exciting to me because it’s become more anticipated as buzz has built as a few people have seen it, but for the longest time nobody was talking about it, and I just thought, I can’t wait until people see this.”
Two other films centered on knockout lead performances by rising stars will also world premiere at the festival: The Wonder, starring Florence Pugh and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, starring Emma Corrin. The Wonder, helmed by A Fantastic Woman director Sebastián Lelio, follows a nurse in Ireland who is hired to watch over a young girl who claims she has not eaten in several months. “I’ve never seen Florence Pugh like this, and that is an absolute compliment,” Huntsinger says of the actor, whose other fall vehicle, Don’t Worry Darling, will premiere at the Venice Film Festival almost simultaneously. “In [The Wonder] she is this profoundly rich, rich character.”
One of several promising projects this fall for The Crown breakout star Corrin, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, helmed by Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre, is an adaptation of the D. H. Lawrence classic about an upper class married woman’s sexual awakening when she begins an affair with her estate’s gamekeeper. “It’s really beautiful,” Huntsinger says. “I’m glad people will see more and more and more of who Emma is.”
The final world premiere is Sam Mendes’s drama Empire of Light, starring Olivia Colman, Micheal Ward, Colin Firth, and Toby Jones, which is said to be a deeply personal drama set at a movie theater in England in the 1980s. Huntsinger describes it as a “beautiful, beautiful, beautiful story” and notes that it’s not exactly what you’d expect from the filmmaker whose last project was the real-time war epic 1917. “It’s quite lovely for him to go into a more intimate kind of a place, where it is very much about internal life, about how we interact with the people closest to us,” she says.
Several films that will have debuted at the Venice Film Festival just days—or in some cases hours—earlier will also make their way to Colorado, including Luca Guadagnino’s Bones & All, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s BARDO, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, and Todd Field’s TÁR.
TÁR, which stars Cate Blanchett as a high-profile orchestra conductor, will get an additional spotlight when Blanchett receives a tribute at the festival. “We could have tributed her a thousand times over from Elizabeth on, and the timing has not worked out ever, but in a way I’m kind of glad that this is the one because, to me, this is her best performance ever,” Huntsinger says.
Beyond all the eye-catching feature narrative films that will make their way to the mountain, Telluride will also debut several hot documentaries. Huntsinger specifically points to Dror Moreh’s exploration of America’s foreign policy in The Corridors of Power, Matthew Heineman’s doc Retrograde about the final months of the war in Afghanistan and Adam Curtis’s “beautiful, seven-hour opus”, Russia [1985–1999] TraumaZone as riveting films that dig deep into the way leaders have led the world into such horrific conflict. Other buzzy docs at the fest include Bryan Fogel’s follow-up Icarus: The Aftermath; Merkel, about the enigmatic former German chancellor; and Sr., a doc about the late filmmaker Robert Downey Sr. that will bring his son, star Robert Downey Jr., to the festival.
The four-day festival will also have plenty of retrospective opportunities, including an 80th-birthday celebration for Werner Herzog and talks with the likes of Karyn Kusama, Mike Mills, and Barry Jenkins. But although celebrity appearances may be one of the many draws, Huntsinger encourages festival-goers to seek out the unknown as well. "It’s tempting, the kind of big, interesting, let’s call them charismatic films, I totally get the pull and draw,” she says. “But I do encourage people all the time that the less you know about a film, that’s telling you that’s the one you need to go see.”
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