Telluride Film Festival Embraces a Political Lineup

Telluride Film Festival Embraces a Political Lineup - The New York Times

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Telluride Film Festival Embraces a Political and Topical Lineup

The films partly reflect the business realities of Hollywood, which is still grappling with the aftereffects of the writers’ and actors’ strikes last year.

As luck would have it, the documentary filmmaker Matt Tyrnauer was recording a conversation with James Carville, the longtime political analyst and subject of Mr. Tyrnauer’s new movie, in May 2023 when a national poll revealed that likely voters favored former President Donald J. Trump over President Biden by seven percentage points.

“It knocked me right off my horse,” Mr. Carville said in the film. That moment set in motion his contentious 18-month campaign to encourage Mr. Biden to drop out of the race.

“I was old. I knew a little bit about what the job entailed, and I had a platform,” Mr. Carville, 79, said in a recent interview. “I felt like I didn’t have another choice.”

Mr. Tyrnauer didn’t have much of a choice, either: He needed to change his film, initially about Mr. Carville’s 30-year career as a very public political consultant, into a more immediate chronicle of Mr. Carville’s effort to alter the course of the presidential election and Mr. Biden’s decision to drop out of the race.

On Friday, the final result — “Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid!” — will debut at the Telluride Film Festival. It is one of 15 documentary films, many about current events, at the Labor Day weekend festival, a four-day confab in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado that caters to Hollywood’s cognoscenti and is often a harbinger for the fall awards season.

Others include “Zurawski v Texas,” from the directors Maisie Crow and Abbie Perrault, which tracks the efforts of Molly Duane, a lawyer with the Center for Reproductive Rights, to fight a Texas law that limits health care options for pregnant women. (The lead plaintiff in the case, Amanda Zurawski, and her husband, Josh, appeared onstage at the Democratic National Convention last week to share their story.) “Separated,” from the famed director Errol Morris (“The Fog of War”), examines the U.S. border family-separation policy enacted by the Trump administration. “No Other Land,” a joint project by a Palestinian activist and an Israeli journalist, details daily life for a West Bank village under Israeli occupation.

A documentary-heavy roster of films, though not unusual for the festival, reflects the business realities of Hollywood, which is still grappling with the aftereffects of the roughly six-month writers’ and actors’ strikes. The dual strikes didn’t stop the work of documentary filmmakers but did pause narrative filmmaking.

“Everybody was a little down earlier this year” because they were concerned that there weren’t enough great films to fill all the fall festivals, said Julie Huntsinger, the director of the Telluride event.

“Sometimes in a year, there are so many fantastic films that it’s hard to choose,” she added. “I think we can all agree what the really great movies are this year, and there’s not a ton past that.”

Other documentaries include entries centered on Martha Stewart and Yoko Ono and one, “In Waves and War,” about the efforts to address post-traumatic stress disorder in veterans through the use of psychedelics. The narrative films include the debut of “Saturday Night,” a dramatic retelling of the opening night of “Saturday Night Live,” from Jason Reitman; the screening of “Maria,” starring Angelina Jolie as the opera singer Maria Callas; and the debut of Michael Gracey’s (“The Greatest Showman”) biopic of the British pop star Robbie Williams.

“We want to be topical. We want to reflect what’s in the zeitgeist,” Ms. Huntsinger said. “Above all things, we are a humanist festival, and things that help us understand more truthfully the human condition, that’s what we want to show.”

Because of the large number of topical documentaries being shown for the first time, the festival may have more of a market feel this year than in years past. One factor of their timeliness is that many are seeking distribution and release ahead of November.

“This is a movie for the fall,” Mr. Tyrnauer said about his film on Mr. Carville. “I want people to see it running up to the election.”

Whether or not that is achievable is a big question. Not only are the filmmakers contending with an expedited time frame but they may also face a reluctance among some distributors, including the global streamers, to take on divisive films for fear of alienating any of their subscribers. Hollywood has recently become far less interested in stories with a preachy message.

“I’m not sure how political any of the big streamers or broadcasters or CNN want to be, probably not at all,” said Bob Berney, chief executive of Picturehouse, an indie film marketing and distribution company. “I think some of the films have a chance, but it has to happen now. They have to be ready to go the day after Telluride. The shelf life is limited.”

Julie Raskin is the executive director for Impact Partners, the production and finance company behind two documentary films at the festival: “Apocalypse in the Tropics,” about the impact of evangelical Christians on the election of Jair Bolsonaro as president in Brazil, and “The White House Effect,” on how global warming became politicized during the George H.W. Bush administration. She has found alternative forms of distribution when releasing films with political subjects at the center.

“Union,” a film from Impact Partners that debuted at Sundance in January and centers on the efforts of Amazon warehouse workers to unionize, is using philanthropic money to self-distribute the movie in theaters in October in conjunction with labor organizations in various cities.

“I think that will be a very successful release, and it might lead to other things in terms of distribution,” Ms. Raskin said. “The thing about controlling the process is that you have a lot more flexibility if there is a streaming offer later. You’re not beholden to anything.”

Yet many of the filmmakers believe that what they have made are not divisive polemics. Mr. Tyrnauer called his movie “a film about an American original that happens to have politics as its backdrop.”

Ms. Crow, one of the directors behind “Zurawski v Texas,” thinks her film would be best suited for a streaming service, one that can maximize audience reach. “I look at it as a work of journalism,” she said.

“These stories are happening every day,” she said, adding, “Just because our participants have gone on to use their voice in a way that they feel is impactful and meaningful doesn’t make the film political.”

Nicole Sperling covers Hollywood and the streaming industry. She has been a reporter for more than two decades. More about Nicole Sperling

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