The Fest Scene

News & gossip about the upcoming festival

Oscar Nominations

February 2, 2010 in Briefs, The Fest Scene by Emily | No comments

The 2009 Oscar nominations were announced early this morning, and we are happy to see a few familiar faces in the line-up. Mountainfilm alumni stacked the documentary feature category, with three films that screened at Mountainfilm 2009 in the running: Burma VJ, The Cove and Food, Inc.

There are also a few more films on the larger list that we’re looking to play in May, 2010. We won’t tell you which ones just yet!

If you didn’t get a chance to see any of these films at at a Mountainfilm screening or elsewhere, you’ll probably get more opportunities now that they’ve been honored with Oscar nods. Check out the trailers, below:

Burma VJ

The Cove

Food, Inc.

Mustang to Air on PBS

November 10, 2009 in The Fest Scene by Emily | No comments

Mustang – Journey of Transformation (MF09) premieres Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 10 p.m. on PBS. In May, Mustang played to two packed, standing room only audiences at the fest. We’re happy those who were turned away in Telluride will finally get a chance to see the film.

Narrated by Richard Gere, Mustang is the remarkable story of a Tibetan culture pulled back from the brink of extinction through the restoration of its most sacred sites.

Congrats to director Will Parrinello of the Mill Valley Film Group, a regular MF filmmaker and attendee. We love to see Will around town during the fest, and are looking forward to seeing what he’s working on next.

Tiji Blur Dance By Luigi Fieni

MountainSummit in Aspen, Colorado

August 24, 2009 in Guest Bloggers, On Tour, The Fest Scene by admin | No comments

ASPEN — On Memorial Day Weekend 2008, Gram Slaton was looking to escape from festival-land. With the debut of the Aspen RoofTop Comedy Festival a week ahead of him, the executive director of the Wheeler Opera House took leave for Telluride, seeking some head-clearing rest and relaxation.

Instead, he found himself dumped into the middle of another festival: Mountainfilm in Telluride, which was entering its 30th year as a local Memorial Day tradition. (Read the Aspen Times Article Here)

Darwin’s Nightmare

August 17, 2009 in Activism, David, The Fest Scene by admin | No comments

A couple of years back I went to see a film called Darwin’s Nightmare by Hubert Saupert, a truly disturbing doc about the largest lake in Africa, Lake Victoria. It has shores that touch Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda and to no one’s surprise, it is struggling.

Nile Perch

This heartbreaking film is about how in the 1960s, the Nile Perch was introduced to the lake as an experiment. Of course, much went awry as the Perch was an able breeder and a vicious predator that wiped out much of the lake’s indigenous fish. The upside was the fish is a big seller in Europe so the local economy got a little boost from the fish industry but that was short-lived and unsustainable. The downside was that the lake’s natural balance was thrown off by the emergence of the perch and it is now slowly dying.

Most films about forlorn and forgotten places in the world have some earnest and dedicated character in the film who is trying to do whatever they can to prevent an overwhelming disaster. Not in this film and it was devastating. I very much remember coming out of the theater in a bit of a daze so I walked around Greenwich Village for a while, then got in a cab to go home to Brooklyn. I had the window open as we drove over the Brookyn Bridge and crossed over the Fulton Fish Market – something I had done countless times - but this time, there was the powerful and unmistakable smell of fish, which nauseated me after seeing that film.

Monday’s NY Times has an update on Lake Victoria and of course, it is not a pretty picture. – David Holbrooke

Lake Victoria

Docuweek in NYC

August 11, 2009 in Behind the Scenes, David, The Fest Scene by admin | No comments

Last week, I had the rare pleasure of seeing docs over consecutive nights in a theater. Of course, it’s not unusual for me to watch a doc for as soon as we open for entries in November, I will watch several hundred films going into the festival. The thing is most of those screenings are on my laptop or a television but not that often in a theater, which is a vastly different experience.

On Wednesday, I went to the IFC theater in Greenwich Village, where I saw Racing Dreams, which was playing as part of DocuWeek, a great program sponsored by the IDA (International Documentary Association). Docuweek was created to help docs qualify for the Academy Awards, by playing for a week in NY or LA. At the IFC, they are running three weeks of docs, several of which I had seen (including Rock Prophecies, which we played at Mountainfilm this year).

I knew from its description that Racing Dreams didn’t feel right for Mountainfilm but it won the Best Doc award at Tribeca so I was looking forward to checking it out. The film follows the now-classic competition formula (which I first saw in Spellbound) where it follows a couple of the competitors over the course of a film, which provides the narrative thread. Then in-between the races, you get to know the kids who are very well-cast. My instincts were right not to go after the film for Mountainfilm as the subject matter – car racing – is not really our thing, but the film certainly was a compelling look at this subculture.

The next night I went to the HBO screening room to watch another film that wasn’t really right for our festival – The Nine Lives of Marion Barry. A friend had worked on the film, which chronicles the rather remarkable story of the former mayor of Washington DC. I grew up in DC and he was a formidable figure in a town that watches power closely.

The film (which premiered at SilverDocs and is playing on HBO this month) is very well-done and moves quickly through the highs (so to speak) and lows of Barry’s wild, wild life. After the screening, I was talking to another member of the audience who said it was nice to see a film about redemption. It was then that I realized that for me, I didn’t really see that redemption. After all, the film closes by telling us that he tested positive for cocaine in 2008, while holding a seat on the City Council representing Ward 8, the poorest part of the city. And the crushing part to me is that Ward 8 particularly needs a city council member who isn’t so diminished by being a cokehead.

Either way, it was great to sit in a darkened theater and take in these films (I have also seen In The Loop, which is extremely funny and worthwhile and Harry Potter) . No distractions of cell phone or email, no pause button, just the films on their unfiltered own. Hope you get to a movie … – David Holbrooke