A year ago, the Telluride Film Festival set off the early fireworks for eventual Oscar winners Daniel Day-Lewis ("There Will Be Blood") and screenwriter Diablo Cody ("Juno"). Can this weekend's festival do the same for "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," "Flash of Genius" and "Slumdog Millionaire"?
Among North America's leading festivals, the Telluride gathering, which kicks off today, is clearly the most idiosyncratic. As organizers wait until the festival's opening day to announce the official schedule, attendees usually don't even know what movies they'll be seeing until they arrive in the mountain hamlet in Colorado.
Coming just days before the start of the Toronto International Film Festival, Telluride has become known as a launching pad for the fall movie season. In part because it shows a fraction of the titles that play in Toronto (or appear at May's Cannes Film Festival or January's Sundance), the Telluride slate is more aimed at cineastes than sales agents. But within its eclectic mix of several dozen films usually lurks at least one end-of-the-year breakout hit.
The festival, now celebrating its 35th anniversary, offers a lineup consistently populated with obscure foreign-language titles; in the past, some Telluride imports, like Germany's "The Lives of Others," go on to great acclaim, while others, such as Norway's "Insomnia," serve only as source material for American remakes.
But Telluride in recent years also has been distinguished for helping to set off the stratospheric trajectories of numerous critical favorites and art-house hits, including "Into the Wild," "The Last King of Scotland," "Little Children," "Capote," "Lost in Translation," "Brokeback Mountain" and "Walk the Line."
In the festival's 2007 installment, programmers organized a tribute to Day-Lewis that included 30 minutes of early footage from "There Will Be Blood." The British actor went on to win the Academy Award for lead actor. And, at the last minute, the festival booked "Juno," which at the time was not even scheduled for a fall release. But the Telluride response to the teen pregnancy story was so strong that Fox Searchlight added the film to its end-of-the-year slate, and "Juno" not only went on to become a commercial smash, but it also captured the original screenplay Oscar.
