This is high season for film festivals. There's Venice, one of the oldest in the world and still one of Europe's blue riband film events, and Toronto, now second only to Cannes as a must for the American critics everyone seeks to entice. Montreal is another huge festival and Haugesund in Norway is one of the Scandinavian events of the year. All of these are crushed into roughly the same time space.
The most exclusive of all, however, is Telluride in Colorado. Why? Because it is the most difficult to get to, it doesn't announce its programme in advance, it charges the press $500 for a pass and it has as its guests some of the best film-makers in the world. Once you arrive, however, it's one of the friendliest and most democratic on the circuit, presided over by Tom Luddy and Bill Pence, the co-directors, as if the least important attendees were just as much their friends as the most distinguished.
Tributes were paid this year to three unexpected recipients - veteran British director Ken Russell, Catherine Breillat, the controversial French director, and Om Puri, the Indian actor best remembered in Britain for his performance as the father in East Is East. Among the other guests were Milos Forman, Peter Bogdanovich, James Ivory, Ismail Merchant and Salman Rushdie who, as guest director, had some of his favourite films screened. Others in attendance included Zakir Hussain, the legendary tabla player, veteran radical film-maker, Stan Brakhage, and Ken Burns, the documentary maker, plus some of Disney's finest animators and a posse of Hollywood stars wandering around almost as if they were normal people.
Telluride is a small town within a valley among the Colorado mountains where you could have bought a small wooden house for a couple of thousand dollars not so long ago but would have to part with the best part of one million now. If you want a small ranch house with a bit of land attached, prepare to pay two to three million. It's an exclusive ski resort where Tom Cruise has a place and the rich from Los Angeles have a second or third home.
The 28th festival prizes its originality, presenting some 40 films over four days and then closing up. Considering many people took a full day, and sometimes two, to get there, it's almost over before it begins. But you are not likely to forget the experience in a hurry. The townspeople love their festival and pack in as if there is no tomorrow.
What they see are often films not yet bought for America, though a successful screening at Telluride makes a difference. For instance, Zach Kunuk's remarkable Atanarjuat, the Fast Runner, the Cannes Camera D'Or winner for best first feature, will now almost certainly be shown elsewhere in America despite the fact that it is 172 minutes long and about a remote Inuit Arctic village. It is one of the best films of the year from any source, rich in detail and superbly dramatised.
Predictably, however, one of the most popular was Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amelie, a huge box-office success in France and a charming fantasy set in a Paris where no Algerians exist and everything looks as Americans who have never been there would imagine.
Three other films deserve special mention. Danis Tanovic's dramatic black comedy, No Man's Land, which deals with the Bosnian conflict in an audaciously original way, was seen and praised at Cannes. Lucrecia Martel's La Cienaga, from Argentina, follows two families in a state of acute emotional paralysis and is rather like a slightly tipsy Latin-American version of Chekhov.
Ray Lawrence's Lantana, which studies four sets of married couples embroiled in a missing persons investigation, is his first feature since the controversial Bliss, which was shown at Cannes a decade ago and given the kind of reception no director could ever forget. It was booed, jeered at and slammed by the majority of critics who actually stayed till the end. Now it is regarded as one of the best Australian films of its time and so is Lantana, an adult study of marital crises that comfortably goes way beyond its thriller status, with Anthony LaPaglia, Barbara Hershey and Geoffrey Rush contributing excellent peformances.
Ken Russell, who found to his surprise that Stan Brakhage was a leading supporter (he's going to teach Russell in his last university term before he retires), was given a standing ovation at his big tribute evening after a talk and screening of A Song Of Summer, his early film about Delius made for British television.
This film, which many Americans have never seen, is certainly one of the best ever made about a composer and his work, with a superb performance from the late Max Adrian as the syphilitic Delius, blind and paralysed but helped to complete his last works by fellow composer Eric Fenby. It is now available in Britain as a video from the British Film Institute.
Catherine Breillat, whose tough,uncompromising and sexually explicit films are rarely seen in America, since most of them would have trouble getting a certificate which would allow a general showing, was also well received. Her latest film, The Fat Girl, was much praised and at long last distributors are considering releasing it along with some of her other films in America.