After the Show: Telluride Potluck 2010

One of the best kept secrets about the Telluride Film Festival is what happens AFTER the event. The town residents are treated to a 6 to 8 film sampler with two different screenings at the Palm Theatre each night (check with the Chamber of Commerce to confirm date and venue). The selection is purely random and usually based on which films don’t have to be shipped out immediately to the next film festival such as Toronto or New York. But if you’re a hard core film fanatic, you can hardly go wrong. The price is affordable – tickets are usually discounted and lodging rates in Telluride drop down to almost half the cost of what they were doing the film festival. The year I attended the mini-post festival in 2010, the featured films were the animated musical drama Chico & Rita (preceded by Jeff Scher’s short, The Shadow’s Dream), Errol Morris’s bizarre documentary Tabloid (preceded by Bill Plympton’s animated short, The Cow Who Wanted to Be a Hamburger), Denis Villeneuve’s powerful drama Incendies, Poetry, a South Korean drama about an elderly woman facing dementia, The First Grader, a true story dramatization set in Kenya, and Javier Bardem in Biutiful, directed by Alejandro G. Inarritu.

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Mortal Thoughts

The story goes like this. German director Werner Herzog made a bet with aspiring filmmaker Errol Morris that if the latter ever completed the film he was working on – which was inspired by a news story about the mass relocation of the graves from a California pet cemetery – he would eat his shoe. Morris did indeed complete his film, which was called Gates of Heaven (1978) and, true to his word, Herzog boiled and ate his show at the film’s premiere in Berkeley. Filmmaker Les Blank recorded the event and turned it into a documentary short entitled Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe in 1980.   Continue reading