LOS ANGELES TIMES: Politics and Hollywood collide at the 2024 Telluride Film Festival

By Josh Rottenberg

TELLURIDE, Colo. —  After crippling Hollywood strikes dimmed the star power at last year’s Telluride Film Festival, celebrities were back in force again. But this year, it wasn’t just the likes of Angelina Jolie, Will Ferrell, Saoirse Ronan and Bill Murray turning heads in the picturesque mountain town. Political figures such as Hillary Clinton, James Carville, Mary Matalin and special prosecutor Jack Smith were also on hand, adding a level of gravity to the festival’s cinematic celebration.

Amid headlines dominated by global conflict and with the country hurtling toward a presidential election both parties deem existential, Telluride felt less like a retreat than a microcosm of the world’s anxieties. Hot-button issues — from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to climate change to reproductive rights — were front and center in documentaries and narrative features, infusing the usual film chatter with the urgency of political discourse.

Former Secretary of State Clinton and her daughter Chelsea were in attendance as producers of the documentary “Zurawski v Texas,” which centers on a recent lawsuit over abortion access in the Lone Star State. In a post-screening Q&A on Saturday alongside three of the plaintiffs who share their own deeply personal stories in the film — Amanda Zurawski, Samantha Casiano and Austin Dennard — Hillary Clinton expressed her hope that the doc, which is currently seeking distribution, will bring renewed focus to the battle to secure access to reproductive care following the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.

“I don’t think we can underestimate how important this film is in order to break through the eye-rolling, the denial, the dismissiveness, the cruelty that has affected so many women’s lives and women’s futures in our country today,” Clinton told a packed audience, which responded to the emotionally wrenching film with both cheers and tears. “Of course, we have lots of stories about abortion and reproductive health, but post Roe being reversed ... this really is a film that breaks through the denial and breaks through the indifference. And it’s only because the women on this stage were willing to tell their stories.”

Chelsea Clinton explained that she and her mother had launched their own production shingle, Hidden Light, “to help platform people telling stories that we think urgently need to be told and yet too often are left in the shadows because the subject matters are often quite uncomfortable for people. And we think we’re in a moment where we actually need to be uncomfortable.”

The global-warming documentary “The White House Effect” also proved a hot ticket, with its Saturday morning screening drawing such a large crowd that dozens were turned away. Composed entirely of archival footage drawn from some 14,000 sources, the film, directed by Bonni Cohen, Jon Shenk and Pedro Kos, largely centers on the pivotal presidency of George H. W. Bush, who came into office promising to be the “environmental president” only to back away from any serious commitment to addressing the threat of climate change, as the issue became muddied by divisive politics and deliberate misinformation.

On a somewhat lighter note, famed Democratic strategist Carville brought his inimitable eccentric Cajun wit and shrewd political analysis to the festival as the subject of Matthew Tyrnauer’s doc “Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid.” During a post-screening Q&A Sunday evening, Tyrnauer explained that he had finished the film, which has been picked up by CNN Films, just before the debate between Trump and Biden, only to have to re-edit it as the campaign quickly took a head-spinning swerve.

Carville, whose seemingly improbable marriage to former Republican operative Matalin forms the emotional backbone of the film, said he hoped the doc would inspire a younger generation to enter the political arena. “The country is never going to be any better than the people that go into politics, and if we just keep telling them that it’s a dirty business or they’re all crooks, they’ll hear you and and they will stay out of politics and the country will go to hell in a handbag,” he told the crowd. “That’s my real passion about this. This is an honorable business.”

Reverberations from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict also rumbled through the festival. Tim Fehlbaum’s gripping narrative feature “September 5” chronicled the kidnapping and massacre of Israeli athletes by Palestinian militants during the 1972 Munich Olympics, as seen by the team at ABC Sports who found themselves scrambling to cover the horrific event in real time. The documentary “No Other Land” explored the occupation of the West Bank through the unlikely bond between a young Palestinian activist and an Israeli journalist.

Among other politically charged docs, Brazilian director Petra Costa followed up her Oscar-nominated “The Edge of Democracy” with “Apocalypse in the Tropics,” about the rise of Jair Bolsonaro, while Errol Morris tackled the Trump administration’s controversial family-separation border policy with his new film, “Separated.”

“Our information revolution is causing a lot of fanaticism, and it’s urgent to create mechanisms that will stop this tribalism from intensifying to the extent that we kill each other and kill the planet,” Costa said in a post-screening Q&A. “I believe that we are at the time of such intense crisis that that will be possible.”

But the film with the most intense political heat at Telluride was one that had been kept under tight wraps until the festival had already begun: the controversial Trump biopic “The Apprentice.” Introducing the film to a packed crowd Saturday night alongside stars Sebastian Stan, who plays Trump, and Jeremy Strong, who plays his ruthless mentor Roy Cohn, director Ali Abbasi said that, contrary to the Trump camp’s fierce pushback following its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, the darkly comic movie was not intended as a takedown of Trump.

“This is not a political hit piece,” the Iranian-born Abbasi (“Holy Spider”) said of the movie, which is slated to hit theaters on Oct. 11, less than a month before the election. “This is not to bash anyone or to promote anyone. This is a mirror, and it is intended to show you, as mirrors do, an image of yourselves as a community.”

Indeed, Abbasi quipped that Trump, whose camp has called the film defamatory and threatened legal action to try to derail its release, was more than welcome to attend the screening. “We had reserved three seats there for him and his bodyguards, and we’re still waiting,” he said. “He might arrive in the dark, you never know.”

Amid the other D.C. figures on hand at the festival, one kept a particularly low profile. Special counsel Smith took a brief break from his ongoing prosecutions of Trump to support his wife, documentarian Katy Chevigny, whose first narrative feature, “The Easy Kind,” about a Nashville singer-songwriter, screened as part of the festival’s Backlot program. Smith was spotted taking in a handful of films, including the Pharrell Williams documentary “Piece by Piece,” but otherwise stayed out of the spotlight.

Amid the various raging political firestorms, Smith’s quiet presence served as a subtle reminder that no matter how high the stakes, some things — like showing up for your spouse — transcend even the most headline-grabbing conflicts.