O Agente Secreto / The Secret Agent (American premiere, in person: Kleber Mendonça Filho, Wagner Moura)

Kleber Mendonça Filho: O Agente Secreto / The Secret Agent (BR/FR/NL/DE 2025) with Wagner Moura as Marcelo.

Made possible by a donation from Keller Doss.

    Larry Gross (TFF 2025): "Marcelo, a middle-aged widower, returns home to reconnect with his young son and father-in-law and investigate unresolved questions about his deceased mother’s past. But something feels off. This is Brazil in the 1970s, and the military dictatorship has been marked by reprisals, paranoia and corruption. Writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s feverishly enthralling melodrama, spiked with energetic bits of ‘70s-style horror and exploitation, is set in his hometown of Recife. The story has nothing to do with Joseph Conrad’s classic 1903 spy novel The Secret Agent, but the film shares, in uncanny fashion, Conrad’s power to evoke history, both personal and political, as a nightmare from which each of us is desperately trying to escape. Mendonça Filho has filled his cast with idiosyncratic and unforgettable characters, and Marcelo, played superbly by Wagner Moura (who played Pablo Escobar in Narcos), earns the Best Actor recognition he won at Cannes." –LG (Brazil/France/Netherlands/Germany, 2025, 160m) In person: Kleber Mendonça Filho, Wagner Moura.

     Viewed at Chuck Jones's Cinema, Telluride Film Festival (TFF), 31 Aug 2025

AA: Kleber Mendonça Filho's The Secret Agent is a powerful political thriller and one of the best films I have seen about Brazil's coming to terms with its past of a brutal dictatorship. It is an excellent companion piece to one of the best films of last year. Walter Salles's Ainda Estou Aqui / I'm Still Here (2024).

I'm Still Here was based on a true story, but The Secret is a fictional account, however aiming at accuracy in portraying the condition of Brazil in 1977, during the government of Ernesto Geisel. Wagner Moura appears in a double role as Marcelo Alves (also called Armando) - and as his son Dr. Fernando in the epilogue. 

Marcelo is a university professor, an internationally renowned technology specialist  and an inventor deeply involved in lithium batteries. In São Paulo he has landed into a violent encounter with an industrial magnate concerning patent issues. Now his life is in danger, and the movie's ambience is that of a constant threat and surveillance. We in the audience felt like this historical film was a prophecy of our future in what was known as the Free World.

We enter the Brazilian underworld of dissidents, living in safe houses under assumed names. The indomitable Elza (Maria Fernanda Cândido) runs the network and Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria) hosts such a house in which Marcelo can stay. Marcelo finds support also with his father-in-law, Seu Alexandre (Carlos Francisco), who runs the iconic cinema and revival house São Luíz, while taking care of Marcelo's son Fernando.

Cinephilia is a current in the movie, and it has inspired the motif of "the hairy leg", drawn from splatter cinema. It became a running gag in dissident journalism, concealing and signalling at the same time taboo events of violent repression. 

The plot is constructed along jumbled timelines, and for a long time it is hard to make sense of what is going on. We have a hold in the present of 1977 but also a key background in what happened before and a today's present in which two young women researchers reconstruct the past and bring their findings on a thumbdrive to an indifferent Fernando.

The Secret Agent portrays with great intensity a condition of corruption, repression and threat. Yet there is also a loose, relaxed, rambling, confusing and sexy ambience of the united colours of Brazil.

"And in the end... ", when all adds up, it is a film about memory: personal and historical.

...

WIKIPEDIA: O AGENTE SECRETO

Sinopse

Ambientado no Recife em 1977, durante o período da ditadura militar no Brasil, O Agente Secreto acompanha a trajetória de Marcelo (Wagner Moura), um professor universitário e especialista em tecnologia que retorna à sua cidade natal após anos afastado e fugindo de um passado misterioso e violento em São Paulo, possivelmente ligado a um conflito com um poderoso industrial e a uma patente ou invenção.

Com sua vida em perigo e sob constante ameaça e vigilância, Marcelo busca encontrar um pouco de paz, proteger seu filho pequeno que vive com os avós maternos (o avô é projecionista no icônico Cinema São Luiz), obter informações sobre o status civil de sua falecida mãe trabalhando disfarçado em um cartório, e, eventualmente, deixar o país. Ele encontra refúgio em um "aparelho", uma casa segura com outros dissidentes e figuras marginalizadas, incluindo um casal de angolanos, o líder idoso Euclides, e uma figura maternal chamada Tânia Maria.

Ao tentar se reaproximar da família e do cotidiano, ele percebe que a cidade está sob intensa vigilância e corrupção do regime autoritário, que utiliza avançados recursos tecnológicos para controlar e perseguir opositores. Marcelo acaba envolvido em uma rede de espionagem e conspirações, enfrentando dilemas morais e pessoais enquanto luta para proteger aqueles que ama e desvendar segredos de seu próprio passado e o de sua família.

A narrativa explora temas como repressão política, vigilância estatal, memória, trauma, identidade, o papel da tecnologia no autoritarismo, a manipulação da verdade e a resistência. O filme traça um retrato crítico e sensível da sociedade brasileira durante uma de suas fases mais difíceis, misturando suspense, drama e elementos de thriller, conduzidos pela direção de Kleber Mendonça Filho, que reforça seu estilo de crítica social e política, com toques de folclore local e referências cinematográficas.

Elenco

Wagner Moura como Marcelo / Armando

Carlos Francisco como Seu Alexandre

Tânia Maria como Dona Sebastiana

Robério Diógenes como Euclides

Maria Fernanda Cândido como Elza

Gabriel Leone como Bobbi

Roney Villela como Augusto

Hermila Guedes como Claudia

Isabél Zuaa como Tereza Vitória

Alice Carvalho como Fátima

Laura Lufési como Flavia

Thomás Aquino como Arlindo

Igor de Araújo como Sergio

Udo Kier como Hans

João Vitor Silva como Haroldo

Kaiony Venâncio como Vilmar

Suzy Lopes

Buda Lira

Produção

Desenvolvimento e Roteiro

O Agente Secreto nasceu do desejo de Kleber Mendonça Filho de realizar um "exercício histórico", ambientando a trama em 1977, durante o governo de Ernesto Geisel, um período da ditadura militar brasileira que o diretor considera menos explorado no cinema em comparação com os anos de chumbo mais intensos. O roteiro foi escrito por Mendonça Filho ao longo de três anos, num processo descrito por ele como difícil, com longos períodos de improdutividade até que a história "passa a se escrever sozinha". O roteiro finalizado continha 167 páginas.

A inspiração inicial para um elemento da trama veio de uma notícia de um jornal australiano sobre um tubarão encontrado com uma perna humana em seu ventre, que se transformou em uma homenagem a filmes de exploração dentro da narrativa. Outra sequência, envolvendo uma bomba de gasolina, originou-se de um curta-metragem que o diretor nunca chegou a filmar. Mendonça Filho afirmou que busca com seus filmes "suscitar ideias" em vez de "levar uma mensagem", e que desejava fazer um filme sobre os anos 70 com "detalhes do coração", explorando como indivíduos navegam e resistem a um sistema opressor. O abrigo de "refugiados" no filme simboliza um "bunker de afeição".

O processo de seleção do elenco incluiu a jovem atriz mineira Laura Lufési, que interpreta Flavia, após um processo de testes. O filme marca a segunda colaboração de Mendonça Filho com Udo Kier, após Bacurau.

Jay Kelly (American premiere, in person: Noah Baumbach, Laura Dern, Adam Sandler)

Noah Baumbach: Jay Kelly (IT/GB/US 2025) starring George Clooney.

Larry Gross (TFF 2025): "When Jay Kelly (George Clooney), a past-his-prime movie star, attends the funeral of a friend (Jim Broadbent), he starts a fistfight with a rival (Billy Crudup) and thus triggers a personal crisis. Soon, Jay has embarked on a deep, funny and late-in-the-game quest to better know his emotional and psychic world (which, hitherto, he’s fastidiously avoided). In Noah Baumbach’s painfully funny journey of memory and discovery, Clooney is effortlessly commanding as he captures Jay’s insecurity and self-absorption. Adam Sandler, as Jay’s long-suffering manager, gives a fine performance, as does the stellar supporting cast: Laura Dern, Riley Keough, Grace Edwards, Emily Mortimer, Patrick Wilson, Greta Gerwig, Alba Rohrwacher, Stacy Keach and Lars Eidinger. Baumbach wrote his emotionally layered and deeply affecting film with Mortimer, and it joins the list of supreme films about the psyche of the motion picture world, along with Fellini’s 8 1/2 and Woody Allen’s STARDUST MEMORIES." –LG (Italy/U.K./U.S., 2025, 132m) In person: Noah Baumbach, Nicholas Britell, George Clooney, Billy Crudup, Laura Dern, Adam Sandler, Patrick Wilson

    Viewed at Chuck Jones's Cinema, Telluride Film Festival (TFF), 31 Aug 2025

"It is a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It's much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all" - Sylvia Plath (motto of the film)

AA: Noah Baumbach's Jay Kelly is a high profile Hollywood self-reflection about film stardom. It is about the greatest questions: balancing career and family - career and friends - career and colleagues. George Clooney radiates classic film star charisma. He is also genuinely vulnerable in exposing the vanity of his character. The movie is a journey that starts in California and leads via Paris to Tuscany. The Italian connection evokes Marcello Mastroianni and his combination of glamour and self-deprecation.

It is a journey of self-discovery for Jay Kelly. He has passed his best before date. His younger daughter is leaving home to a grand tour of Europe, and Jay decides to follow her, against her wishes, almost stalking her. His daughters are vocal in their assessment. "Dad was never there". "You didn't spend time with me". Their crucial period of growing up is over, and Jay is irrevocably estranged from his children. He does not even know them.

The film starts at a funeral of a colleague, where Jay meets an old friend from the theatre school. They used to be best friends, but a meeting at a bar leads to a fistfight. Jay Kelly has an entourage of trusted colleagues (Adam Sandler, Laura Dern), but he insults and hurts them, and they are leaving him.

The memory journey of bitter self-reflection is a concept familiar from Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries. At the private jet, the bullet train and walking through the Tuscany landscape, Baumbach inserts dream and memory flashbacks from Kelly's past. Jay is forced to introspection, confronting his inner emptiness. "Who am I? An American dream". His plastic smile and made-up face have become substitutes for identity.

But during the journey Jay Kelly also experiences the true blessing of movie stardom. He brings joy to people. The train passengers are genuinely enthusiastic to meet the movie star in person. And Kelly is grateful for meeting real people at last. At this turn, Baumbach enters the make-believe territory of a Hollywood musical. When an old lady's handbag is stolen and the thief runs away from the train, Kelly chases and catches him, but he also realizes that the man has mental problems and needs help. Kelly becomes a real star for the train passengers. 

The climax is a tribute to Kelly at an Italian film festival. Baumbach handles this in a mode of condescending parody and portrays the film festival activists in crude caricature. This is the film's  weakness, as well as the tired running joke with the cheesecake.

A Tribute to Noah Baumbach (Telluride 2025) (in person: Noah Baumbach, Laura Dern, Adam Sandler)

Noah Baumbach

Made possible by a donation from Katrine & Bill Formby

Rajendra Roy (TFF 2025): "It has been 30 years since Noah Baumbach arrived on the scene with KICKING & SCREAMING (1995), a film that announced a generational talent. It has been 20 years since he established himself as a central figure in current cinema, following the release of THE SQUID AND THE WHALE (2005). With a seemingly effortless ability to shift between collaborative, studio traditions and a more auteurist mode of working, Baumbach has nimbly avoided being locked into any of the industry bear-traps that have ensnared so many of his contemporaries. He is at once today’s Lubitsch or Nichols, and on occasion our Woody Allen or Rohmer."

"Baumbach’s filmography reads like a deeply thought-out “films I would want on a desert island” list: the whimsy and wisdom of his writing collaborations with Wes Anderson, THE LIFE AQUATIC (2004) and FANTASTIC MR. FOX (2009), to the piercingly personal MARGOT AT THE WEDDING (2007) and MARRIAGE STORY (2019), all the way through to the smart escapism of his scripts for MADAGASCAR 3 (2012, co-written with Eric Darnell) and BARBIE (2023, co-written with Greta Gerwig). He is the rare filmmaker who successfully embraces the spectrum of cinematic creativity. His vision is liberated from the dogmatic fads of the era, and that has allowed him to flourish. Baumbach’s hugely successful collaborations with Greta Gerwig (on script and on-screen) as well as his

consistent, devoted attention to the women in his scripts and films serve as a welcome counterpart to the “broteur” movies that proliferated in turn-of-the-century cinema. Some of the thornier areas of investigation in his work—the examination of failure, the endless complexities of family and the creative process, the treacherous journeys of self-discovery—are always addressed with a deep, often humorous humanity. This is why we regularly find ourselves smiling during his films, finding the heart in the sometimes-anguished narrative."

"Perhaps the real reason we return to Baumbach, and look forward to new films like JAY KELLY (2025), is because we know that he brings a vulnerability and authenticity to his work that a lesser artist would work to hide. Roger Greenberg, Frances Halladay and Harold Meyerowitz are all title characters in the cinematic lives Baumbach created for them (in GREENBERG (2010), FRANCES HA (2012) and THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES (2017), respectively), but they are also deeply human, lived-in portraits of flawed people navigating a world we recognize. Our empathy for these characters, our ability to fall in love with them, is a direct result of a writer-director who loved them first."

–Rajendra Roy (TFF 2025)

This program includes a selection of clips, an on-stage interview and a screening of Jay Kelly in its entirety. 

Moderated by Rebecca Keighan,

Visited at Chuck Jones's Cinema, Telluride, 31 Aug 2025.

THE CLIPREEL:

Kicking and Screaming

The Squid and the Whale

Margot at the Wedding

Greenberg

Frances Ha

While We're Young

Mistress America

The Meyerowitz Stories

Marriage Story

White Noise

Man on the Run (World screen premiere, in person: Morgan Neville)

Morgan Neville: Man on the Run (US 2025) featuring Paul McCartney.

Jason Silverman (TFF 2025): "In one of the most surprising sequences yet seen in a music biography, Paul McCartney, then 28 years old, is fixing up a remote, dilapidated Scottish farmhouse. He tends to sheep, cuddles with his wife, Linda, and their two little girls, and plays music in the barn into a four-track recorder. Morgan Neville (TWENTY FEET FROM STARDOM, WON’T YOU BE MY NEIGHBOR?, PIECE BY PIECE) offers a new take on one of history’s most documented humans, overturning much of what we’ve learned about Sir Paul (who served as executive producer). With full access to Paul’s journals, Linda’s wonderful photos and the notoriously evasive man himself (who sat for seven interviews), Neville provides a stirring, sharp-eyed and deeply pleasurable corrective to the standard McCartney narrative (no, he didn’t break up The Beatles!). We take a journey with a thoughtful, endlessly inventive soul who, post-Fab Four, challenged himself to grow up." –JS (U.S., 2025, 115m) In person: Morgan Neville

    Viewed at Palm, Telluride Film Festival, 30 Aug 2025

AA: Morgan Neville's Man on the Run is an authorized film portrait of Paul McCartney after the breakup of The Beatles, doing justice to Linda McCartney, providing a first person narration by Paul himself, and giving us access to a treasure trove of private family archives.

To me, the movie emerges as a perfect counterpart to Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards's One to One: John & Yoko (GB 2024), one of the best movies of last year. It was the story of John Lennon and Yoko Ono after The Beatles, also with lots of previously unseen material and setting the recording straight with Yoko. Both wives were at the time victims of misogynist abuse.

The Beatles had been a case of a "once in a millennium chemistry", not only an act hard to follow but impossible. John and Yoko diversified in different directions, including social engagement. Paul and Linda followed the example of Rousseau: "back to nature". They became sheep farmers in Scotland and focused on family life. They were active in music, too, but the band was inseparable from family.

Paul was happy to be free from a dependence of people's praise. He didn't care about style or stylists and flaunted on being uncool, even in bad taste. "We invented Spinal Tap" he says. He continued to create great original music but also enjoyed playing "Mary Had a Little Lamb" and "You Are My Sunshine".

The film itself is a celebration of ordinary family life. But no family is ordinary.

Man on the Run belongs to a contemporary trend of creating non-fiction from extremely checkered material. McCartney revelled with lo-fi in music, and the same goes for the visuals. It's a collage and a compilation from footage that is often visually awful, but the hectic edit makes us forget that. It is a mosaic puzzle. It aspires to the condition of animation.

Besides correcting the record of Linda, Man on the Run is also important in doing justice to Paul and John. John Lennon finally admitted that Paul had been right all along about Allen Klein, the crook who tried to rob the Beatles fortune. In this film we have a definitive account of Paul's reaction to the murder of John Lennon. They had just made a reconciliation. John's death was such a devastating blow to Paul that it was beyond words for him to register it in public.

"And in the end... " We don't hear the last words in the movie, but we know them by heart: "the love you take is equal to the love you make".

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (World premiere, in person: Scott Cooper, Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong - and Bruce Springsteen and Jon Landau)

Scott Cooper: Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (US 2025) with Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen.

Made possible by a donation from Roger Durling

David Fear (TFF 2025): "In 1981, Bruce Springsteen found himself at a crossroads. Having just finished the biggest tour of his career, should he go back into the studio? Or lay low and recharge his batteries alone at home? While pondering his next move, he began to mess around with an acoustic guitar and a 4-track machine. The result, Nebraska, a spare album of American gothic storytelling, is now considered one of his best albums, even though he had to fight to get it released. Scott Cooper (BLACK MASS, HOSTILES) dives deep into this pivotal moment in the Boss’s life, giving us a gritty portrait of an artist as a blue-collar seeker, ready to follow his creative impulses to the ends of the Earth, even if it means tanking his career and looking into his dark past. The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White plays Springsteen as a troubled soul chasing healing and truth; Jeremy Strong plays Bruce’s manager-slash-guardian angel Jon Landau." –DF (U.S., 2025, 112m) In person: Scott Cooper, Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong - surprise guests: Bruce Springsteen and Jon Landau

    Viewed at Palm, Telluride Film Festival, 30 Aug 2025

AA: In the morning I saw Blue Moon by Richard Linklater, with Ethan Hawke in a brilliant performance as Lorenz Hart during an evening of terminal humiliation. My day of films about great musicians continues with Scott Cooper's Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere focusing on a profound career crisis of Bruce Springsteen.

Springsteen has already released Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town and The River when he suffered a serious case of depression and something close to a mental breakdown.

Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) faces the ghosts of his past - a broken home, an alcoholic father (Stephen Graham), a childhood under the shadow of domestic violence against Bruce's loving mother (Gaby Hoffmann). He dates a nice woman who works at a cafeteria (Odessa Young).

Springsteen suffers from the discrepancy of being a working class artist and a big star drawn to an elite lifestyle, just like Merle Haggard in Ethan Hawke's Highway 99 A Double Album. This is a hard dilemma in art and life.

My favourite moment is the final confrontation of Bruce with the character played by Odessa Young. She defies Bruce to confront himself and stop running away from himself. If he does not do that, he can never meet the significant other.

The album Nebraska, initially rejected by Columbia, is a key part of that. Inspired by Terrence Malick's Badlands, about parricide and a subsequent killing spree, Bruce confronts his demons challenging received notions of pop music.

Deliver Me from Nowhere is a deeply moving film about depression and redemption.

The screening was followed by an unforgettable Q & A with Bruce Springsteen and Jon Landau as surprise guests. Jon Landau, Bruce's manager, had seen the musician perform in 1974 and written that he "saw rock and roll future, and its name is Bruce Springsteen". They still work together, in one of the great partnerships in culture. 

Landau saw in Springsteen two things: humility and swagger. Perfectly captured by Jeremy Allen White and Scott Cooper in their powerful film.

Next to the great Springsteen soundtrack - with Jeremy Allen White himself singing with true conviction - an important choice is "The Last Mile of the Way", a gospel song written and composed by Sam Cooke, performed by Sam Cooke and The Soul Stirrers in 1955.

...

An excellent review by Steve Pond:

https://www.thewrap.com/springsteen-deliver-me-from-nowhere-review-jeremy-allen-white/

Blue Moon (2025) (American premiere, in person: Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke, Andrew Scott)

Richard Linklater: Blue Moon (US 2025) with Margaret Qualley (Elizabeth Weiland) and Ethan Hawke (Lorenz Hart).

Larry Gross (TFF 2025): "Lorenz Hart wrote lyrics—”My Funny Valentine,” “The Lady Is a Tramp,” “Blue Moon”—that helped establish 20th-century American popular music as an art form. Richard Linklater, working from Robert Kaplow’s brilliant screenplay (adapted from Hart’s letters), provides a mesmerizing depiction of Hart (played by Ethan Hawke) through a single eventful night as he nears the end of his life. Hart copes with having been cast aside by his musical partner, the composer Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott), a romantic infatuation with a much younger woman (Margaret Qualley) and his terminal affair with alcohol. Linklater’s film is urbane, witty and heartbreaking, and Scott, Qualley and Bobby Cannavale, as a philosophical bartender, offer terrific support. Hawke, on camera for every scene, is astonishing from first moment to last, sharp-tongued, nearly out-of-control, soulful and not-quite broken. BLUE MOON provides the painful elegance and beauty of a song by Rodgers and Hart." –LG (U.S./Ireland., 2025, 100m) In person: Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke, Andrew Scott

AA: Telluride Film Festival pays tribute to Ethan Hawke with two films exploring American musical legacy. They could not be more different. Highway 99 A Double Album is a portrait documentary of the country & western legend Merle Haggard. Blue Moon is a chamber play set in the terminal period of Lorenz Hart, lyricist of many of the greatest entries in the Great American Songbook (Broadway, musical theatre, Hollywood musical). A common denominator is the battle with alcohol.

The premiere of Oklahoma! composed by Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott) with his new lyricist partner Oscar Hammerstein II (Simon Delaney) turns into an evening of humiliation for Lorenz who is accompanied by his protégée Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley). The long and successful partnership of Hart and Rodgers is about to end because of Lorenz's alcoholism. 

Blue Moon is the ninth Ethan Hawke movie directed by Richard Linklater, and it is the result of a 12-year period of gestation. Linklater wanted to wait until Hawke was ready for it. In a superb performance, Hawke incarnates the brilliant but flawed protagonist with absolute conviction. The result is completely different from what we have seen from the Hawke before.

Based on the correspondence of Lorenz Hart and Elizabeth Weiland, Blue Moon is full of wit, great music and brilliant performances. There is not a weak link. The monologues and dialogues are fantastic, worthy of Golden Age Hollywood movies like All About Eve, but an irresistible cinematic flow is missing. 

A Tribute to Ethan Hawke (Telluride 2025) (in person: Ethan Hawke)

Ethan Hawke. Photo: Telluride Film Festival / © Eugene Kwon.

Made possible by a donation from the Burns Family.

John Horn (TFF 2025): "In his new film BLUE MOON, Ethan Hawke stars as the great lyricist Lorenz Hart at the moment he’s been spurned. His collaborator Richard Rodgers has just opened Oklahoma! on Broadway with a new partner, Oscar Hammerstein II. The dyspeptic Hart drunkenly mocks Rodgers and Hammerstein’s soon-to-be-classic musical, spitting out crude jokes and self-important boasts. Why would Hawke agree to play such an outwardly disagreeable character? Through his depiction, he makes the film about more than a has-been alcoholic writer: He makes it about art itself."

"Hawke’s virtue as an artist is his passion for the creative process. He’s acted in studio productions including an Oscar-nominated performance opposite Denzel Washington in TRAINING DAY (2001). His scores of independent movies include decades-long partnerships with BLUE MOON filmmaker Richard Linklater on the films BOYHOOD (2014), WAKING LIFE (2001) and the director’s BEFORE trilogy (1995, 2004, 2013), two of whose screenplays Hawke co-wrote. And Hawke has directed both narratives and documentaries with a focus on storytellers and artists, including his Flannery O’Connor drama WILDCAT (2023) and the documentary SEYMOUR: AN INTRODUCTION (2014), about renowned music teacher Seymour Bernstein."

"In his latest documentary, HIGHWAY 99 A DOUBLE ALBUM, he turns his lens on the music icon Merle Haggard: “I fell in love with country music because my dad loved it,” Hawke says at the film’s start. “Country music was something we could always enjoy together.” The film retraces key events in the singer’s often troubled life, including a stint in San Quentin where, in a life-changing jailhouse epiphany, Haggard saw Johnny Cash perform."

"Hawke’s works as a writer include several best-selling books, among them Meadowlark, his second graphic novel. He adapted his first novel, 1996’s The Hottest State, for the screen. Why write? “I was very restless,” Hawke said. “I really enjoyed the buzz of being around creative people and the high of trying to talk about why we’re born and why we have to die, and so I tried to write. I thought that the experience would make me grow.” (His mother famously told Hawke after reading the first draft, “Well, you’re no Chekhov.” Hawke says he needed to hear it.)"

"“You learn very quickly that acting at its best is like music, and you’re a vocalist and a musician—that there’s a rhythm and a sound,” Hawke has said. “And you have to get inside your character’s song.” Sometimes that song might be bleak. More often than not, it is joyful. But over the course of his continually unpredictable career, Hawke makes it very hard not to stop, lend an ear ... and listen." –John Horn (TFF 2025)

The program includes a selection of clips, an on-stage interview and BLUE MOON (see opposite page) shown in its entirety.

Viewed at Chuck Jones' Cinema, Telluride Film Festival (TFF), 30 Aug 2025

CLIPREEL

Dead Poets Society

Before Sunrise

Training Day

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

Boyhood

First Reformed

Highway 99 a Double Album (World premiere, in person: Ethan Hawke, Ryan Hawke, Buddy Squires)

Ethan Hawke: Highway 99 a Double Album (US 2025). Ethan Hawke.

Jason Silverman (TFF 2025): "“The spoken word holds the whole thing together,” says John Carter Cash, talking generally about culture and specifically about Merle Haggard. “Someone needs to speak it into existence.” During his prime, Haggard might be best compared to Bob Dylan: Both seemed to have the ability to reach up into the unknown and pull down songs that were completely alive and tuned into the moment. Haggard lived an epic life, surviving crushing childhood poverty and teenage incarceration and his explosive rise to fame. In the 1960s, he was both a hit-maker and a potent spokesperson for America’s rural poor and then, with one 1969 song, landed at the center of the ‘60s culture wars. Haggard may be the Odysseus of country music, and director Ethan Hawke is his Homer. He has lovingly crafted a wise, big-hearted and endlessly surprising biography featuring songchapters performed and remembered by American musical royalty, Dwight Yoakam, Rosanne Cash and Norah Jones among them." –JS (U.S., 2025, 193m) In person: Ethan Hawke, Ryan Hawke, Buddy Squires"

    Viewed at Sheridan Opera House, Telluride Film Festival (TFF), 29 Aug 2025

AA: Ethan Hawke's Highway 99 A Double Album is a non-fiction biopic of Merle Haggard (1937-2016) , the country & western legend. It fulfills artist biopic expectations as a "rise and fall" story and transcends them magnificently. 

It is a fantastic movie about music - about Merle Haggard, his family and the entire country & western culture. It is an illustrated version of a fictional "double album" of 26 of Merle Haggard's greatest songs, sung by himself and countless other great performers, male and female, black and white.

At the heart is "Okie from Muskogee" (1969), the protest song against protest songs, the anthem of the silent majority, embraced by Richard Nixon.

Until then, folk and country music had not neglected its ties with the Depression era. The 1960s folk & protest movement was close to country & western. But now a divide appeared between hippies and anti-hippies, reflecting a wider change in America.

Merle Haggard was embraced by Nixon and Reagan, but Haggard distanced himself from fake populism. He stayed true to the forgotten people, the hard-working America. He shared their pain and love.

He also distanced himself from well-meaning liberals who talked down to people. This is the biggest issue of the movie and the biggest challenge of today. Populism is taking over everywhere, and liberal democrats have lost touch with the people. Haggard was not a teacher, but he teaches us.

Ethan Hawke reveals Merle Haggard as an artist who kept growing as a great poet and musician while fighting to make sense of his contradictions.

I happened to sit in front of Hawke and congratulated him in person for this movie that alone was worth the visit to Telluride.

PS. 4 Sep 2025: confirmation post festum: Highway 99 a Double Album was my favourite at the Festival.

The American Revolution Part I (World premiere, in person: Ken Burns, Buddy Squires, Megan Ruffe)

Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, David Schmidt: The American Revolution (US 2025).

Part 1 S/Fri 10AM - Part 3 M/Sat 3:15PM - Part 4 L/Sun 9:30AM Q&A

Jason Silverman (TFF 2025): "America’s most influential historian takes on the biggest story of all: the founding of our nation. Ken Burns, working with co-directors Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt, creates an epic tapestry—art from the period, digital imagery, excerpts from diaries and letters, insights from contemporary historians—that challenges our conventional tale of American independence. We see brutal battles (some with 40 percent casualty rates), complex and slippery geopolitics, waves of immigrants taking up arms for the Patriots, and heroes with their own moral failings (including a dependence on slave labor, indentured servants and the seizure of indigenous lands). We see American independence as touch-and-go, emerging through a decades-long series of actions that required courage, adaptability and resourcefulness, along with collaboration by those who disagreed on fundamental issues. And it required a new idea that motivated the masses: a nation governed by the many, rather than by kings." –JS (U.S., 2025, 720m) In person: Ken Burns, Buddy Squires, Megan Ruffe

    Viewed at Sheridan Opera House, Telluride Film Festival (TFF), 29 Aug 2025

AA: 250 years ago the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783) lit the fire for the world tired of monarchy, absolutism, feudalism, religious persecution and discrimination and privileges of the aristocracy and other old world elites. America gave the model for the French Revolution and all other revolutions for freedom, democracy and equality.

It takes Ken Burns to tackle the epic subject in a cinematic / televisual way. Eight years in the making, the Florentine team tucked into treasure troves of materials, from historical documents and artworks to today's experts, reflecting multiple viewpoints.

Burns does not evade topics of controversy, and the greatest of them is in the heart of the matter: the country created on the idea of liberty was based on slavery. This is the still unhealed wound in America.

My travel reading is Howard Zinn's classic A People's History of the United States: 1492 - Present, a copy of which I bought from the Between the Covers / Bruno Coffee bookstore, a book that is reportedly now being blacklisted in America. Burns incorporates the wide perspective of such an authentically popular approach in contrast to the old-school "great men" history-writing. More than this, Burns transcends bipartisan positions and stands for the "e pluribus unum" ideal of America.

As always, Burns is the master of the rostrum camera and "the Ken Burns effect", developing the innovation of Luciano Emmer and Alain Resnais, celebrated at the time by André Bazin. We enter the world of an illustration and dramatize a quest inside. Digital technology enhances the possibilities of animated journeys in historical materials. Illuminated or boldfaced animation brings written documents to life. 

Burns dramatizes his tale as an oratorium of expert voices and historical testimonies read by a glorious cast of great actors (see below). 

In its epic approach The American Revolution is grandiose but not bombastic. We are used to sanitized and glorified history versions, but a true patriot finds greater satisfaction in truth. More than his predecessors, Burns exposes the shocking violence of the American Revolution.

During the pandemic, Tom Luddy sent me a link to the fantastic Hemingway (US 2021), the only Burns work that I have seen with complete focus. I should devote a year of my life in viewing the complete works of Ken Burns. 

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THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION: EPISODE GUIDE FROM IMDB:

S1.E1 ∙ In Order To Be Free

Sun, Nov 16, 2025

S1.E2 ∙ An Asylum For Mankind

Mon, Nov 17, 2025

S1.E3 ∙ The Times That Try Men's Souls

Tue, Nov 18, 2025

S1.E4 ∙ Conquer by a Drawn Game

Wed, Nov 19, 2025

S1.E5 ∙ The Soul of All America

Thu, Nov 20, 2025

S1.E6 ∙ The Most Sacred Thing

Fri, Nov 21, 2025

FROM THE WEBSITE PBS / KEN BURNS / THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION: 

The American Revolution was at once a war for independence, a civil war, and a world war. It impacted millions – from Canada to the Caribbean and beyond. Few escaped its violence.

The American Revolution A film by Ken Burns Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt

Premieres Nov. 16, 2025

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION examines how America’s founding turned the world upside-down.

Thirteen British colonies on the Atlantic Coast rose in rebellion, won their independence, and established a new form of government that radically reshaped the continent and inspired centuries of democratic movements around the globe.

An expansive look at the virtues and contradictions of the war and the birth of the United States of America, the film follows dozens of figures from a wide variety of backgrounds. Through their individual stories, viewers experience the war through the memories of the men and women who experienced it: the rank-and-file Continental soldiers and American militiamen (some of them teenagers), Patriot political and military leaders, British Army officers, American Loyalists, Native soldiers and civilians, enslaved and free African Americans, German soldiers in the British service, French and Spanish allies, and various civilians living in North America, Loyalist as well as Patriot, including many made refugees by the war.

The Revolution began a movement for people around the world to imagine new and better futures for themselves, their nations, and for humanity. It declared American independence with promises that we continue to strive for. The American Revolution opened the door to advance civil liberties and human rights, and it asked questions that we are still trying to answer today.

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New Six-Part, 12-Hour Series Directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt and Written by Geoffrey Ward

PBS to Launch Largest Outreach Effort in Network’s History, with Filmmaker Events in 25-plus Markets, Station Engagement Across the Country, Extensive Educational Materials, and Partnerships with Leading National and Local Organizations  

Washington, DC – January 9, 2025 – THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, a new six-part, 12-hour documentary series that explores the country’s founding struggle and its eight-year War for Independence, will premiere on Sunday, November 16 and air for six consecutive nights through Friday, November 21st at 8:00-10:00 p.m. ET (check local listings) on PBS. The full series will be available to stream beginning Sunday, November 16 at PBS.org and on the PBS App.

The much-anticipated series, which has been in production for eight years, was directed and produced by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt and written by long-time collaborator Geoffrey C. Ward. The filmmakers and PBS scheduled the broadcast for 2025, the 250th anniversary of the start of the war, which began in the spring of 1775, more than a year before the Declaration of Independence. 

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION examines how America’s founding turned the world upside-down. Thirteen British colonies on the Atlantic Coast rose in rebellion, won their independence, and established a new form of government that radically reshaped the continent and inspired centuries of democratic movements around the globe.

An expansive look at the virtues and contradictions of the war and the birth of the United States of America, the film follows dozens of figures from a wide variety of backgrounds. Viewers will experience the war through the memories of the men and women who experienced it: the rank-and-file Continental soldiers and American militiamen (some of them teenagers), Patriot political and military leaders, British Army officers, American Loyalists, Native soldiers and civilians, enslaved and free African Americans, German soldiers in the British service, French and Spanish allies, and various civilians living in North America, Loyalist as well as Patriot, including many made refugees by the war. The American Revolution was a war for independence, a civil war, and a world war. It impacted millions – from Canada to the Caribbean and beyond. Few escaped its violence. At one time or another, the British Army occupied all the major population centers in the United States – including New York City for more than seven years.

“The American Revolution is one of the most important events in human history.” said Ken Burns. “We went from being subjects to inventing a new concept, citizens, and set in motion democratic revolutions around the globe.  As we prepare to celebrate the 250th anniversary of our founding, I’m hopeful that people throughout the country will come together to discuss the importance of this history and to appreciate even more what our ancestors did to secure our liberty and freedoms.”

“Our film tells the remarkable history of the people who lived through the American Revolution, their everyday concerns, and their hopes, fears and failings,” said Sarah Botstein (THE U.S. AND THE HOLOCAUST, HEMINGWAY, THE VIETNAM WAR). “It’s a surprising and deeply relevant story, one that is hugely important to understanding who we are as a country and a people. The Revolution changed how we think about government – creating new ideas about liberty, freedom, and democracy.”

“The Revolution was eight years of uncertainty, hope, and terror, a brutal war that engaged millions of people in North America and beyond and left tremendous loss in its wake,” said David Schmidt (BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, THE VIETNAM WAR). “At the same time, the Revolution also changed how Americans thought about themselves, their government, and what they were capable of achieving. The United States that emerged from the war was a nation few could have imagined before the shooting began in April 1775.”

The Revolution began a movement for people around the world to imagine new and better futures for themselves, their nations, and for humanity. It opened the door to advance civil liberties and human rights, and it asked questions that we are still trying to answer today. “I think to believe in America, rooted in the American Revolution, is to believe in possibility,” the historian Jane Kamensky says in the series. “Everybody, on every side, including people who were denied even the ownership of themselves, had the sense of possibility worth fighting for.”

Kamensky is one of dozens of scholars and writers who appear in the film or advised the production, including Rick Atkinson, Friederike Baer, Maggie Blackhawk, Ned Blackhawk, Darren Bonaparte, Christopher Leslie Brown, Vincent Brown, Colin G. Calloway, Stephen Conway, Iris de Rode, Philip J. Deloria, Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Kathleen DuVal, Joseph J. Ellis, Charles E. Frye, Annette Gordon-Reed, Don N. Hagist, William Hogeland, Maya Jasanoff, Edward G. Lengel, William E. Leuchtenberg, Jennifer Loren, Holly A. Mayer, Nathaniel Philbrick, Jeffrey Rosen, Claudio Saunt, Barnet Schecter, Stacy Schiff, Alan Taylor, Michael John Witgen, Kevin J. Weddle, Gordon S. Wood, Serena Zabin, and the late Bernard Bailyn.

Burns’s long-time collaborator Geoffrey C. Ward (THE VIETNAM WAR, JAZZ, BASEBALL, THE CIVIL WAR) wrote the script and is the primary author of the companion book, The American Revolution, which will be published by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Penguin Random House, on November 11, 2025.

Led by the cinematographer Buddy Squires, the series features original footage that highlights the beauty and diversity of the North American landscape. The team shot in every season over the course of several years and at nearly a hundred locations, within and beyond the original 13 colonies, including at the American Revolution Museum at Yorktown, Colonial Williamsburg, Fort Ticonderoga, Jamestown Settlement, Minute Man National Historical Park, Monmouth Battlefield State Park, Mount Vernon, Valley Forge National Historical Park, the South Carolina backcountry, overseas in London and the English countryside, and elsewhere. The filmmakers also worked with extensive networks of reenactors to film troop movement and camp life.

The film, narrated by Peter Coyote, includes the first-person voices of nearly 200 individual historic figures, read by a cast of actors, including Adam Arkin, Jeremiah Bitsui, Corbin Bleu, Kenneth Branagh, Josh Brolin, Bill Camp, Tantoo Cardinal, Josh Charles, Hugh Dancy, Claire Danes, Jeff Daniels, Keith David, Hope Davis, Marcus Davis-Orrom, Bruce Davison, Leon Dische Becker, Alden Ehrenreich, Craig Ferguson, Morgan Freeman, Christian Friedel, Paul Giamatti, Domhnall Gleeson, Amanda Gorman, Michael Greyeyes, Jonathan Groff, Charlotte Hacke, Tom Hanks, Ethan Hawke, Maya Hawke, Lucas Hedges, Josh Hutcherson, Samuel L. Jackson, Gene Jones, Michael Keaton, Joe Keery, Joel Kinnaman, Tracy Letts, Damian Lewis, Laura Linney, Josh Lucas, Michael Mando, Carolyn McCormick, Lindsay Mendez, Tobias Menzies, Joe Morton, Edward Norton, David Oyelowo, Mandy Patinkin, Wendell Pierce, Jon Proudstar, Matthew Rhys, LaTanya Richardson, Liev Schreiber, Chaske Spencer, Dan Stevens, Meryl Streep, and Yul Vazquez, among others.

The film uses a wide variety of music, both from the period and newly composed pieces for the series, with recordings by Johnny Gandelsman, Rhiannon Giddens, Jennifer Kreisberg, David Cieri, Yo-Yo Ma, and many more. In addition to using hundreds of 18th-century maps, the filmmakers created and commissioned over a hundred new maps. There are also well over a thousand still images in the film, including paintings, letters, lithographs, and other archival materials, from museums, galleries, and libraries throughout the United States and abroad.

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION is a production of Florentine Films and WETA Washington, D.C. Directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt. Written by Geoffrey C. Ward. Produced by Sarah Botstein, David Schmidt, Salimah El-Amin and Ken Burns. Edited by Tricia Reidy, Maya Mumma, Charles E. Horton, and Craig Mellish. Co-Produced by Megan Ruffe and Mike Welt. Cinematography by Buddy Squires. Narrated by Peter Coyote.  The executive in charge for WETA was John F. Wilson (who passed away in November of 2024). Executive producer is Ken Burns.

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KEN BURNS OFFICIAL SITE 

For more than four decades, Ken Burns and his colleagues at Florentine Films—directors, writers, producers, editors, and cinematographers—have produced some of the most critically acclaimed and most-watched documentaries on public television.

  

...

KEN BURNS FILMOGRAPHY (WIKIPEDIA)

Brooklyn Bridge (1981)

The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God (1984)

The Statue of Liberty (1985)

Huey Long (1985)

Thomas Hart Benton (1988)

The Congress (1988)

The Civil War (1990; 9 episodes)

Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio (1992)

Baseball (1994; 9 episodes – updated with The Tenth Inning in 2010, with Lynn Novick)

Thomas Jefferson (1997; 2 episodes)

Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery (1997)

Frank Lloyd Wright (1998, with Lynn Novick)

Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton & Susan B. Anthony (1999)

Jazz (2001; 10 episodes)

Mark Twain (2002)

Horatio's Drive: America's First Road Trip (2003)

Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (2005; 2 episodes)

The War (2007, with Lynn Novick; 7 episodes)

The National Parks: America's Best Idea (2009; 6 episodes)

Prohibition (2011, with Lynn Novick; 3 episodes)

The Dust Bowl (2012; 2 episodes)

The Central Park Five (2012, with Sarah Burns and David McMahon)

Yosemite: A Gathering of Spirit (2013)

The Address (2014)

The Roosevelts: An Intimate History (2014; 7 episodes)

Jackie Robinson (2016, with Sarah Burns and David McMahon; 2 episodes)

Defying the Nazis: The Sharps' War (2016, with Artemis Joukowsky)

The Vietnam War (2017, with Lynn Novick; 10 episodes)

The Mayo Clinic: Faith – Hope – Science (2018, with Erik Ewers and Christopher Loren Ewers)

Country Music (2019, 8 episodes)

Hemingway (2021, with Lynn Novick; 3 episodes)

Muhammad Ali (2021, with Sarah Burns and David McMahon; 4 episodes)

Benjamin Franklin (2022, 2 episodes)

The U.S. and the Holocaust (2022, 3 episodes, 7 hours total; produced and directed with the assistance of Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein)

The American Buffalo (2023, 2 episodes)

Leonardo da Vinci (2024, with Sarah Burns and David McMahon; 2 episodes)

The American Revolution (November 16, 2025)

52th Telluride Film Festival (29 Aug - 1 Sep 2025) lineup

Poster design: Daniel Clowes.

Data from the Telluride Film Festival (TFF) website.

The Show:

AFFEKSJONSVERDI / SENTIMENTAL VALUE (d. Joachim Trier, Norway/France/Denmark/ Germany, 2025)

AGENTE SECRETO, O / THE SECRET AGENT (d. Kleber Mendonça Filho, Brazil/France/ Netherlands/ Germany, 2025)

ALLLY BAQI MINK / ALL THAT'S LEFT OF YOU (d. Cherien Dabis, Germany/Cyprus/Occupied Palestinian Territory/Jordan/Greece/ Qatar/Saudi Arabia, 2025) TBA UPDATE

AMERICAN REVOLUTION, THE  (d. Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, David Schmidt, U.S., 2025)

ASK E. JEAN (d. Ivy Meeropol, U.S., 2025)

BALLAD OF A SMALL PLAYER (d. Edward Berger, Hong Kong/ Macau, 2025)

BEND IN THE RIVER, THE  (d. Robb Moss, U.S., 2025)

BLUE MOON (d. Richard Linklater, U.S./Ireland, 2025)

BUGONIA (d. Yorgos Lanthimos, U.K., 2025)

COVER-UP (d. Laura Poitras, Mark Obenhaus, U.S., 2025)

CYCLE OF LOVE, THE  (d. Orlando von Einsiedel, U.K./India/Sweden, 2025)

EVERYWHERE MAN: THE LIVES AND TIMES OF PETER ASHER (d. Dayna Goldfine, Dan Geller, U.S./U.K., 2025)

FRANKENSTEIN (d. Guillermo del Toro, Mexico/U.S., 2025) TBA UPDATE

GHOST ELEPHANTS (d. Werner Herzog, Angola/Namibia/U.S., 2025)

GRAZIA, LA (d. Paolo Sorrentino, Italy, 2025)

H IS FOR HAWK (d. Philippa Lowthorpe, U.K./U.S., 2025)

HAMLET (d. Aneil Karia, U.K., 2025)

HAMNET (d. Chloé Zhao, U.K., 2025)

HIGHWAY 99 A DOUBLE ALBUM (d. Ethan Hawke, U.S., 2025)

HISTORY OF SOUND, THE  (d. Oliver Hermanus, U.S., 2025)

IF I HAD LEGS I’D KICK YOU (d. Mary Bronstein, U.S., 2025)

JAY KELLY (d. Noah Baumbach, Italy/U.K./U.S., 2025)

KARL (d. Nick Hooker, U.K., 2025)

LOST IN THE JUNGLE (d. Chai Vasarhelyi, Jimmy Chin, Juan Camilo Cruz, U.S./Colombia, 2025)

LUMIÈRE, L'AVENTURE CONTINUE / LUMIÈRE, LE CINÉMA (d. Thierry Frémaux, France, 2024)

MAN ON THE RUN (d. Morgan Neville, U.S., 2025)

MASTERMIND, THE  (d. Kelly Reichardt, U.S., 2025)

NEW YORKER AT 100, THE  (d. Marshall Curry, U.S., 2025)

NOUVELLE VAGUE (d. Richard Linklater, France, 2025)

PILLION (d. Harry Lighton, U.K., 2025)

RESERVA, LA / THE RESERVE (d. Pablo Pérez Lombardini, Mexico/ Qatar, 2025)

SHIFTY (d. Adam Curtis, U.K., 2025)

SPRINGSTEEN: DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE (d. Scott Cooper, U.S., 2025)

SUMMER TOUR (d. Mischa Richter, U.S., 2025)

THIS IS NOT A DRILL (d. Oren Jacoby, U.S., 2025)

TUNER (d. Daniel Roher, U.S./Canada, 2025)

URCHIN (d. Harris Dickinson, U.K., 2025)

VIE PRIVÉE / A PRIVATE LIFE (d. Rebecca Zlotowski, France, 2025)

YEK TASADEF SADEH / IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT (d. Jafar Panahi, Iran/France/ Luxembourg, 2025)

A TRIBUTE TO ETHAN HAWKE .

A TRIBUTE TO NOAH BAUMBACH .

A TRIBUTE TO JAFAR PANAHI .

The following short films will screen in the main program:

ALL THE EMPTY ROOMS (d. Joshua Seftel, U.S., 2025)

ALL THE WALLS CAME DOWN (d. Ondi Timoner, U.S., 2025)

LAST DAYS ON LAKE TRINITY (d. Charlotte Cooley, U.S., 2025)

SALLIE’S ASHES (d. Brennan Robideaux, U.S., 2025)

SONG OF MY CITY (d. David C. Roberts, U.S., 2025)

Each year Telluride Film Festival pays tribute to individuals whose artistry has significantly contributed to the art of cinema. The 2025 Silver Medallion will be presented to Oscar-nominated writer/ director Noah Baumbach (with JAY KELLY); Oscar-nominated actor/writer/ director Ethan Hawke (with BLUE MOON, HIGHWAY 99 A DOUBLE ALBUM); and award-winning Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi (with IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT). Programs will include a compilation of clips, an on-stage interview and a screening of the recipient’s new work.

Telluride Film Festival is proud to announce Emmy- and Academy Award–winning producer and filmmaker Ezra Edelman as this year’s Guest Director. A cherished Festival tradition, the Guest Director program invites a distinguished artist to curate a special selection of films, offering audiences a fresh lens through which to explore cinema history.

Edelman, acclaimed for his Academy Award–winning documentary O.J.: MADE IN AMERICA, brings his distinctive voice and passion for storytelling to the Festival with a handpicked selection of films. His curated program is presented in partnership with Turner Classic Movies (TCM), the Festival’s proud sponsor of the Guest Director section this year.

ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN (d. Alan J. Pakula, U.S., 1976)

MALCOLM X (d. Spike Lee, U.S., 1992)

NETWORK (d. Sidney Lumet, U.S., 1976)

RASHOMON (d. Akira Kurosawa, Japan, 1950)

THE INSIDER (d. Michael Mann, U.S., 1999)

“It is almost impossible to detect themes across culture at the moment given the absolutely fractured nature of our world,” remarks Festival director Julie Huntsinger. “Certainly, filmmakers are talking about myriad subjects. At Telluride though, there always seems to be a thread of beautiful humanism in the stories told and this year is no different. At the heart of every one of them is the essence of humanity that is profoundly illuminating and beautiful, even if they're also heartbreaking. We’re thrilled with what these filmmakers are sharing and proud to welcome back some old friends as well as new voices. Long live cinema, long live the theatrical experience.”

TFF annually celebrates a hero of cinema who preserves, honors, and presents important, meaningful films. British Producer Tessa Ross will be recognized with the Festival’s Special Medallion, at the presentation of BALLAD OF A SMALL PLAYER.

We are delighted to welcome new sponsor Google to Telluride Film Festival’s shorts section, Filmmakers of Tomorrow, which includes Student Prints, screening six films from the best in student-produced work from around the globe; and Calling Cards, screening ten exceptional new works by promising filmmakers.

Telluride Film Festival’s Education Programs present students with the opportunity to experience film as an art form and to expand participants’ worldviews through film screenings and filmmaker discussions, including:

– Student Symposium – an immersive seminar for graduate and undergraduate students, underwritten by Golden Globes Foundation

– City Lights Project – pairing high school students and teachers with Festival films and guests, made possible by the Artemis Rising Foundation

– FilmLAB – leading filmmakers meet with American Film Institute Fellows

– FilmSCHOLAR – program for young critics and scholars in partnership with University of Wisconsin

– Backlot, Telluride’s intimate screening room featuring behind-the-scenes movies and portraits of artists, musicians and filmmakers will screen the following programs, all free and open to the public:

ALL I HAD WAS NOTHINGNESS (d. Guillaume Ribot, France, 2025)

CAROL & JOY (d. Nathan Silver, U.S., 2025)

CHAPLIN: SPIRIT OF THE TRAMP (d. Carmen Chaplin, Spain/U.K./ Netherlands, 2024)

EARTH TO MICHAEL (d. Nico López-Alegría, ZZ, U.S., 2025)

ELIE WIESEL: SOUL ON FIRE (d. Oren Rudavsky, U.S., 2024)

THE GOLDEN SPURTLE (d. Constantine Costi, U.K./Australia, 2025)

KING HAMLET (d. Elvira Lind, U.S./Denmark, 2025)

MEGADOC (d. Mike Figgis, U.S./U.K., 2025)

SHOOTING (d. Netalie Braun, Israel, 2025)

THEIR EYES (d. Nicolas Gourault, France, 2025)

Telluride Film Festival’s Talking Heads programs allow attendees to go behind the scenes with the Festival’s special guests. The Conversations series, sponsored by Indian Paintbrush, is devoted to cinema and culture. The outdoor Noon Seminars feature a panel of guests discussing a wide range of film topics. These programs are free and open to the public.

Special Screenings and Festivities include:

CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS 3D 2025: Restoration and Recreation (d. Werner Herzog, France/Canada/U.S./U.K./Germany, 2010)

THE GOLD RUSH (d. Charles Chaplin, U.S., 1925) 4K restoration

LEARNING TO FLY (d. Max Lowe, U.S./France/Switzerland/Italy/ China/Hong Kong, 2025)

STEAL THIS STORY, PLEASE! (d. Carl Dean, Tia Lessin, U.S., 2025)

Truth Be Told: Journalism and Filmmaking in the 21st Century, a Special Panel presented by Turner Classic Movies

Behind The Lens: AI and Filmmaking, presented by Google

Thomas Mann: Der Zauberberg / The Magic Mountain (a novel)

Waldsanatorium (1911). Today's Waldhotel Davos, Buolstrasse 3, CH-7270 Davos Platz. Please click on the photo to expand it.

DE (Deutsches Reich = Deutsche Republik = Weimarer Republik): Berlin: S. Fischer Verlag / Samuel Fischer, 1924. Zwei Bände. I Band 578 Seiten, II Band 629 Seiten. Insgesamt 1.207 Seiten.

    Finnish translation (the first Finnish edition): Taikavuori 1–2. Porvoo: WSOY, 1957. Translator: Kai Kaila. 361+370 = 731 pages.

    Read at Sovintola, Kesälahti, 15 Aug 2025.

Coordinates of the novel:

Location: Davos, Switzerland.

Timeline: 1907–1914.

Centenary of The Magic Mountain (2024).

150th anniversary of Thomas Mann (2025). 

I read The Magic Mountain for the first time, alerted by the anniversaries of the novel and its author, but most importantly, the most electrifying reading experience of the end of last year: Edwin Frank's Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel (2024).

Frank focuses on 31 novels. His table of contents is not a "best of the best" list but a sampling of a special category that Frank calls "the twentieth-century novel". An epilogue on "the 21th century novel" focuses on Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald. A prologue harks back to the 19th century to discuss Notes from Underground (1864) by F. M. Dostoevsky. From it, Frank tracks a lineage to Kafka, Woolf, Proust, Joyce, Musil... and The Magic Mountain.

Nothing might seem in greater contrast to the miserable den of Dostoevsky's Underground Man than the Berghof Forest Sanatorium, an elite institution high up on the Swiss Alps. But Edwin Frank detects a link between Dostoevsky's troublesome nameless protagonist and Hans Castorp, Mann's unheroic hero, "life's problem child".

A further topical link to The Magic Mountain is what is for me the book of the year, Sarah Wynn-Williams's Careless People (2025). One of its anthology pieces is a chapter devoted to the Facebook team's visit to the World Economic Forum in Davos.

As a man of the cinema I am fascinated by Mann's preoccupation with time. It is explicit from the first page to the last. Mann reminds us that time is called Lethe, the stream of oblivion, and like in ancient myth, it flows around the cave of Hypnos and through the Underworld. 

In Chapter Seven, "A Walk by the Sea" (the English title is "By the Ocean of Time"), Mann discusses time as a fundament of narrative and music, two kinds of time: the actual time of the presentation and the imagined time of the story. They can be identical, or the storyteller can use foreshortening and temporal perspective, with eternity as the limit.

Hans spends seven years on the mountain. The first days seem to last long, but after a few weeks, time starts to flash by. Hans loses his sense of time and even his own age. On a ski trek, caught in a blizzard, Hans finds shelter and believes he has fought the elements around the clock. In fact it has only been fifteen minutes.

Mann was aware of Einstein's theory of relativity and Bergson's concepts of the subjective duration of the mind and the objective time of the chronometer. Mann was also fascinated by Schopenhauer's thoughts about the sustained now, nunc stans, Plato's ideas of time and eternity, and time as a moving image of eternity (Chapters Five and Seven).

The Magic Mountain is not a historical novel, but it has been created in full awareness of its historical turning-point. It takes place during la Belle Époque and ends in what was then called the Great War. It is about what Hermann Broch and Christopher Clark have called "the sleepwalkers".

During his seven years on the Alps, Hans, who is not an intellectual, has time to pursue many interests. While fighting tuberculosis, he studies books on anatomy, physiology and biology (Chapter Five) and reflects on the mystery of life.

Large language models and generative pre-trained transformer chat robots are key topics of our time. "Artificial intelligence" is an irresistible marketing slogan once again. Record fortunes are made.

I have been reading this year about attempts to create digital models of the simplest living beings such as caenorhabditis elegans ("The Worm That No Computer Scientist Can Crack", Wired, March 2025). It is not certain that the task will ever be accomplished.

For Hans Castorp, a parallel epiphany is provided by the protoplasm. He is fascinated to realize that prerequisites for consciousness seem inherent in life - organic matter - itself, in its most primitive stage, even before the formation of a nervous system. He proceeds further to reflect on the distinction of the material and the immaterial. What is energy? What is electricity?

Besides books, interests in Davos include moving images. Pre-cinema motion picture machines are available. In Chapter Five we enter the cinema itself at the Davos-Platz Bioscope Theatre. Mann gives a merciless account of an early cinema show of attractions and actualities. "Hands rested powerless in front of the emptiness". "Distances were abolished and time reversed. The past was transformed into a present that jerked and bumped aimlessly, wrapped in music" (my rough re-translation).

Photography is among the passions, even including Lumière's colour technology, and there is an anthology piece in Chapter Seven that I think Susan Sontag included in On Photography*. The Magic Mountain was her favourite novel. As a teenager, on Dec 28, 1949, Sontag paid a visit to Mann at Pacific Palisades. On 14 Dec 1987 she wrote a memoir, "Pilgrimage", about it for The New Yorker.

Painting has not been forgotten. Memorable pages are dedicated to a portrait of Clavdia Chauchat, painted by the Hofrat Behrens, the director of the sanatorium. Behrens is an amateur, but he has accomplished a fascinating likeness of Chauchat's skin. The painting's ghostly reversal is Clavdia's X-ray image. This "interior portrait" becomes a treasure for Hans. 

The weakness of The Magic Mountain is the female presence. The female protagonist, Clavdia Chauchat, is enchanting but her presentation is disappointingly shallow. The X-ray photograph is the only access to her "interior life". Even the name is in the lineage of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels (Chaud Chat = Hot Pussy). A case of an unrequited love. But Clavdia is the one who gives Hans the pencil.

As always in Mann, music reigns supreme. With a high quality gramophone, the inhabitants can access the best music and the best performers. Schubert's "Der Lindenbaum" is the song that Hans keeps singing when we lose track of him in the trenches of the World War.

While Hans is no intellectual, he gets increasingly drawn into the company of ones. The main debates take place between the humanist Settembrini and the extremist Naphta. They disagree on everything but their debates are fascinating. This is a real treasure until the final tragic passages. 

Something happens in the finale, a degradation that even takes the form of spiritism, which Mann does not reject as a hoax. Hans is deeply disturbed to meet the spirit of his dear deceased cousin Joachim Ziemssen. 

Naphta's father has been murdered by an antisemitic mob, but otherwise anti-Jewishness has been lying dormant. Now the rabid antisemite Wiedemann attacks a Jewish patient called Sonnenschein. The general atmosphere described by Mann reminds me of today's situation of hate speech and the "enshittification" of the internet. Here we return to Sarah Wynn-Williams magisterial Careless People and its epic account of the corruption of Facebook. Over-reacting to Settembrini, Naphta insists on a duel, with fatal results.

Georg Lukacs has been evoked as a model for Naphta, even by Mann, who was puzzled that his admirer Lukacs did not recognize this. But nobody who knows Lukacs can recognize him here. Mann's account of the degradation of the spirit that leads to the catastrophic war is not incompatible with Lukacs's vision of the destruction of reason, although they would have disagreed in every detail.

The Magic Mountain is a great novel of the classical school (in contrast to contemporary experimental masterpieces by Woolf, Kafka, Joyce and Proust), but it is thoroughly modern in its subjects and insights.

Without having read the German original, I feel that Kai Kaila's Finnish translation is true to Mann. I loved reading the novel in two volumes. Newer editions are invariably in single volumes. Finland was a Germanophilic country from Martin Luther till 1944 and an Americanophilic country from 1945 till January 2025. Kai Kaila, one of our best translators, excelled both with Thomas Mann and William Faulkner.

...

* Susan Sontag discusses The Magic Mountain on p. 163 of On Photography. She writes about Hofrat Behrens's two portraits of Clavdia Chauchat. Illness as metaphor already.

** 11 Oct 2025: Martin Wolf highlights The Magic Mountain as prophetic for today

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Edwin Frank: Stranger Than Fiction (2024): table of contents

Edwin Frank: Stranger Than Fiction : Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel. US: Vintage Publishing, 21 Nov 2024. 480 pages.

Prologue: the ellipsis: Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground — 3

Part I. Breaking the vessels. 

1. The vivisector: H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau — 29

2. The abyss: André Gide’s The Immoralist — 46

3. Shutter time: Alfred Kubin’s The Other Side and 

Franz Kafka’s Amerika — 62

4. Youth and age: Colette’s Claudine at School and 

Rudyard Kipling’s Kim — 79

5. The American sentence: Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives — 101

6. A world of literature: Machado de Assis’s The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas and 

Natsume Soseki’s Kokoro — 116

7. Hippe’s pencil: Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain — 142

8. What did you do in the war? Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and 

James Joyce’s Ulysses — 160

Part II. A scattering of sparks. 

9. For there she was: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway — 191

10. Nick stands up: Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time — 211

11. Critic as creator: Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities — 226

12. The human and the inhuman: Italo Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno and 

Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight — 241

13. The exception: D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and 

The Rainbow — 255

14. The end: Hans Erich Nossack’s The End and 

Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate — 280

Part III. The withdrawal. 

15. Don’t cry: Anna Banti’s Artemisia and 

Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart — 301

16. Reflections on damaged life: Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and 

Alejo Carpentier’s The Lost Steps — 317

17. The whole story of America: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man — 334

18. Boom: Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude — 351

19. Into the abyss: Georges Perec’s Life a User’s Manual — 363

20. Being historical: Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian and 

Elsa Morante’s History — 377

21. The enigma of arrival: V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival — 394

21TH CENTURY NOVEL

Epilogue: W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz — 411