Telluride Film Festival Student Symposium “Life-Changing” For Attendees – Deadline

Austin Sipes, scholar symposium coordinator for the Telluride Film Festival, checked on this yr’s class that had traveled far and broad to take part in what he termed as a “life-changing” immersion into the intricacies of filmmaking.

In 2000, as an undergraduate on the University of Vermont, Sipes hitched up in Telluride as one of many few chosen to interact within the scholar symposium, now in its thirty third yr.

Okay, how life-changing was it? “A thousand million percent life-changing,” got here the sparky response.

“I tell the students every year that it’s a life-changing experience,” Sipes instructed me.

“And invariably they come to me afterwards with cries of, ‘You are not kidding!’”

Sipes now works in actuality tv. He’s at present affiliate director of Top Chef, and left the shoot for a number of days to run the Telluride symposium.

Over the years, I’ve noticed scores of scholars, sporting their distinctive orange lanyards, trooping into screenings on the city’s Werner Herzog Theatre, or the Palm, or the Galaxy in the wrong way.

One yr I used to be past determined to get right into a screening on the tiny Nugget Theatre on Colorado Avenue. The small group of scholars forward of me within the queue vowed to save lots of me a seat inside.

They stored their phrase.

Barry Jenkins (Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk), as this column talked about just lately, was within the Telluride class of 2002. Apart from the tradition shock of seeing snow for the primary time and “being in a town as white as Telluride,” his expertise right here was additionally “life-changing.”

The filmmaker instructed me how he went from “being someone who was an apprentice at the festival to being someone who was being brought into the interior of the festival,” and he remembered promoting T-shirts on the town to assist fund the making of his first film Medicine for Melancholy. He recalled that many of the shirts had been bought by Telluride workers.

“He’s our best,” Sipes acknowledged. ”And he promotes this system so nicely as a result of, clearly, he’s our first Oscar winner, that I do know of.”

Sipes defined that the system was the identical for Jenkins 20 years in the past because it was for the 2023 consumption.

It’s an application-based program for 50 school or college college students, U.S. and worldwide. 

This yr, 200 college students utilized from the U.S., Canada and abroad.

They had been tasked with writing a brief essay, and their submissions needed to embody a letter of advice from a professor or an advisor, “and from there it’s based on how well-written their essay is and what their professor says about them, essentially,” Sipes defined.

Applicants had been charged with writing a couple of movie that they felt passionately about, mentioned Sipes, who recalled that when he took half he wrote in regards to the revisionist Western masculinity of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch.

Sipes was accepted and, together with Jenkins, has been a part of the Telluride Film Festival household ever since.

A council of 4, together with Sipes, sifts by way of the candidates’ submissions to choose their 50.

“They have a fairly rigorous schedule of symposia with filmmakers — like Barry or Francis Ford Coppola or whoever it is –[who] will come and sit down and talk to the students for 45 minutes, and it’s just them,” Sipes disclosed.

Watching Sipes work together with a gaggle of male college students made me consider the traditional film Goodbye, Mr. Chips [the 1939 Robert Donat one, not the 1969 version starring Peter O’Toole] — ladies do take part within the scheme, however none had been available after I visited the symposium desk contained in the Brigadoon pavilion.

Justin Colebrooke from Georgia State University was thrilled to be included as a result of he had believed that attending Telluride had been an “inaccessible” dream.

Jacob Stefiuk, finding out movie manufacturing at Concordia University in Montreal, nodded in settlement.

Grant Conversano, a graduate of the North Carolina School of the Arts, began out at Telluride in 2017 and has returned yearly since, working within the training companies division.

He was feeling fairly satisfied as a result of NCSA, he instructed me, is the place Jeff Nichols (Loving, Mud) studied “and he’s here with a film!” (That movie, The Bikeriders starring Austin Butler, Jodie Comer and Tom Hardy, has its world premiere screening at Telluride at present.)

The college students are handed an envelope by Sipes that comprises credentials plus $200 to assist them by way of the lengthy weekend.

The perception, the data, the accessibility to world-class filmmakers is priceless.

Jenkins mentioned one thing about how Telluride wraps its arms round you — for all times.

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