Telluride Film Festival: ‘Room,’ ‘Suffragette’ and the big bang theory of diverse programming

A few years ago, Telluride Film Festival director Julie Huntsinger and her colleagues had a heated discussion about whether the influential mountain festival featured enough films directed by and starring women.

“We only reflect what’s out there,” Huntsinger said in an interview this week, in advance of the festival’s opening on Friday. “There’s never an agenda. It’s just about the very best movies. This year, women are doing it.”

The Telluride Film Festival, which runs over Labor Day weekend and traditionally serves as launching pad for many of the movies that will go on to win Academy Awards next February, is flush with actresses, women directors and films reflecting a female point of view, including the first public screenings of the Brie Larson captivity drama “Room,” the activist movies “Suffragette” and “He Named Me Malala,” and the first showing in North America of the lesbian love story “Carol.”

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Men don’t get short shrift — “Black Mass,” in which Johnny Depp plays Boston mobster Whitey Bulger, will screen for the first time in North America; as will Tom McCarthy’s tale of the Boston Globe covering the Catholic sex abuse crisis, “Spotlight”; Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs biopic, “Jobs”; and Charlie Kaufman’s stop-motion movie “Anomalisa.”

“People are in for big bang after big bang,” Huntsinger said of the festival she programs with Tom Luddy.

Among the documentaries there is a healthy share of serious film, such as war correspondent Michael Ware’s “Only the Dead,” Charles Ferguson’s climate change documentary “Time to Choose” and a documentary about the 2014 Ukrainian revolution called “Winter on Fire,” which director Evgeny Afineevsky was still tweaking to take in fast-changing events there.

“It’s a bit of a serious year, with powerful films that have a lot to say,” Huntsinger said.

The robust and varied slate of 46 features follows a year in which Telluride, for the first time, got push-back from another film festival for its unusual programming policy in which new films are called not premieres but “discoveries,” allowing them to officially premiere days later at the larger and flashier Toronto International Film Festival. The Toronto organizers, who pointed out that the festival scene has evolved since Telluride’s low-profile beginnings in 1973, have since backed down.

“The dissemination of information has made it so there is nowhere to hide,” Huntsinger said of the increased media coverage of Telluride, which attracts a large number of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences members and, consequently, journalists covering awards seasons. “Everything we were doing quietly in a mountain town is much more broadcast. But it’s still really hard to get here. We can’t even find people to make croissants. We might have to fly someone in on our charter.”

Difficult as it may be to get to the isolated former mining town at 8,750 feet, Telluride has managed to attract some of cinema’s most significant female stories this year.

There are the first public screenings of two movies that could serve as companion pieces in the feminist cinematic universe, “He Named Me Malala,” Davis Guggenheim’s documentary about the Nobel Prize-winning teenage Pakistani activist for female education Malala Yousafzai; and Sarah Gavron’s “Suffragette,” a period drama starring Carey Mulligan and Meryl Streep as women campaigning for the right to vote in England. And there is the documentary about “Queen of Soul” Aretha Franklin, “Amazing Grace,” begun by Sidney Pollack and completed after his death.

Telluride will also unveil some of the year’s most anticipated performances by actresses, including Larson in the Lenny Abrahamson drama “Room,” Emma Donoghue’s adaptation of her own novel about an abducted woman raising a child in captivity; Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett in Todd Haynes’ “Carol”; and Charlotte Rampling in Andrew Haigh’s “45 Years,” as a woman planning her 45^th wedding anniversary when she receives some unexpected news. Mara will also be the subject of a tribute.

In addition to Gavron, the festival has a significant contingent of female directors including Australian filmmaker Jennifer Peedom, who brings her documentary “Sherpa,” about the Himalayan mountaineers; experimental filmmaker Laurie Anderson, with her autobiographical film “Heart of a Dog”; and Lisa Immordino Vreeland, with her portrait of an arts patron in “Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict.”

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