It’s no secret that the Telluride Film Festival lineup is missing a certain something this year. They’re still screening “Tar,” “Bones and All,” and “Women Talking,” but many marquee titles didn’t make the cut either.
An Eric Kohn interview with Telluride head honcho Julie Huntsinger is as sprightly as one might expect when chatting with Julie. She’s truly a delight. However, she didn’t hold back when it came to her Venice counterpart Alberto Barbera.
Huntsinger is clearly irked by his competitive nature and how he might have stolen a few films that she really wanted at her festival:
Though Telluride doesn’t designate its films based on premiere status, many of its highest-profile selections will be arriving at the festival straight from the Lido, as the two fall festivals have returned to pre-pandemic levels of intense competition. “It’s gotten less cooperative in years past because of their rules about world premieres,” Huntsinger said of Venice, though she declined to name specific films that were unavailable for Telluride due to Venice timing. “I just don’t think that’s conducive to saving an art form that’s existentially threatened,” she said. “I hope that there can come a time where filmmakers don’t have to choose between us. I really hope we can cooperate to save cinema.”
We’ll maybe never know what films were being pursued by Huntsinger that inevitably got vetoed by Barbera. Some of the missing “Oscar-bait” that was conspicuously absent from today’s Telluride announcement include Aronofsky’s “The Whale,” Florian Zeller’s “The Son,” Bill Pohlad’s “Dreamin’ Wild,” Andrew Dominik’s “Blonde,” Joanna Hogg’s “The Eternal Daughter,” and Martin McDonagh’s “The Banshees of Inisherin.”