Signed by President Lyndon Johnson in September 1964, the Wilderness Act begins with a bit of policy poetry intended to define “wilderness”:
“A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”
Come May 23, Telluride’s Mountainfilm festival (through May 26) will mark the 5oth anniversary of the congressional act with its Moving Mountains Symposium. The daylong ideas extravaganza kicks off the annual four-day festival of film, art, panels, even trail walks.
There’s a certain elegance to summers in Telluride. A vital player in global film culture, the Telluride Film Festival has owned the Labor Day weekend for more than four decades. Founded in 1979, Mountainfilm stakes out the Memorial Day holiday. Differently prestigious, the summer bookends speak to the cultural ambitions and sweep of the state: Our arts are essential. So, too, our understanding of the outdoors in the deepest, celebratory, challenging ways. Hence this year’s wilderness theme.
“That’s in our DNA. We started as a festival for climbers. They were going to places nobody else went, and they were seeing things — deforestation, the effect of climate change on glaciers,” says Mountainfilm’s director David Holbrooke.
“The result was in our expanding our scope of programming while staying true to our core. And something like wilderness is very much at the heart of what we’re doing.”
Every film festival of any authentic vitality has programming that speaks of its unique character. The Moving Mountains Symposium began in 1994.
That year the theme was Tibet. “At the time, that was an issue that wasn’t getting much attention in the media,” says program director Emily Long. Recent symposium themes have been Climate Solutions, Population, and Awareness Into Action.
The symposium gathers heavy hitters who’ll set the table intellectually for what will unspool on screen. Attendees head into the rest of the weekend with an appetite for questioning movies, filmmakers, themselves. When most of the programming is composed of documentaries, bringing a critical skill set should be a requirement.
For instance, Colorado filmmakers Ben Knight and Travis Rummel’s poetic and activist film “DamNation” is unapologetically aligned with the dam- removal efforts taking place in the U.S. Yet the filmmakers smartly raise questions about how our values as a society can — often must — change over time. Without being a polemic, the beautifully composed film leads us to ponder the human rhythms of building and dismantling, expansion and reduction, which have their moments, their reasons. Our sustainability as a species comes in tussling with the good and ill of that. True problem-solving does not treat daunting issues as “no- brainers.”
Perhaps that’s why the symposium’s first panel is called “Does Wilderness Exist?”
This year’s emcee or “trail guide,” M. Sanjayan of Conservation International, will engage oceanographer Sylvia Earle; Tim DeChristopher, whose civil disobedience in the face of oil and gas extraction on federal lands in Utah landed him in prison for two years; David Foreman, Earth First! and the Rewilding Institute founder; and biologist John Francis of the National Geographic Society.
The two-pronged question at the heart of the panel doesn’t take much for granted: What is wilderness and does it actually exist?
Other Mountainfilm guests include Pulitzer Prize-winning scientist Jared Diamond, conservationist and historian Douglas Brinkley, New Yorker journalist Dexter Filkins, and Cheryl Strayed, whose best-selling memoir “Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail,” recounting her solo 1,000-plus-mile trek in the Pacific Northwest, will have its big-screen close-up later in the year.
“We look at what we feel can edify our audience,” Holbrooke says. “We have a pretty tuned-in, sophisticated audience. We believe we can go deeper and go further.”
“People sometimes say, ‘Wait, I thought this was a film festival.’ What they don’t understand is that, yes, but it’s also an ideas festival.” Exactly.
Lisa Kennedy: 303-954-1567, lkennedy@denverpost.com or twitter.com/bylisakennedy
Mountainfilm
May 23-26, Telluride. Four days of film and arts programming, including the daylong Moving Mountains Symposium. Festival program information, tickets and passes via mountainfilm.org.
