Telluride Film Festival 2004

Oh, did I mention you’ve probably already put on about 5 layers of clothes because it’s freezing. Now you need to figure out what you can take off to fit into your sleeping bag, but not freeze to death. You get up in the morning and do it again. When 4 days have past, my guess would be you’ve spent less than an hours time in the campsite that you weren’t asleep.

Condo living at the Telluride Film Festival is nothing like what I just described. We spent quite a lot of time in the condo. Most of the meals that we had we prepared ourselves and ate in the condo, which was great! These were fancy gourmet meals. We had lots of wine and cheese. There is something about getting a group of close friends together; preparing and enjoying a meal. There were 9 of us for the majority of the weekend. Having a place to do that was fantastic. Oh, I forgot to mentioned, this year in Telluride it snowed. It was definitely a good year to have a place indoors. The steam shower didn’t suck.

Movies this year were… just OK, but nothing really mind blowingly amazing. A few of the most enjoyable films at this year’s festival were “Up and Down” a film written and directed by Jan Hrebejk out of the Czech Republic. Before the movie people raved about another film he wrote and directed called “Divided we Fall”, which was nominated for a Acadamy award in 2001. Seeing “Up and Down” in Telluride makes me want to check out “Divided we Fall”.

I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the short films, especially the student shorts. I really enjoyed the story of “Amal” by a young film maker out of Canada named Richie Mehta. All of the characters in the film were from Canada. The film is shot on location in New Dehli, India with all the dialogue in Hindi. The story is sort of a fable about a pure hearted rickshaw driver.