Telluride, Colorado is endowed with some of the most shimmery high-altitude beauty on the planet. Its world-renowned festivals draw climbers, skiers, intelligentsia, gourmands, music lovers and movie buffs from every corner.
Our favorite Telluride festival is Mountainfilm. We love the way it’s managed to maintain a real-deal, grassroots, mountain town vibe while delivering like crazy on inspiring films and speakers.
This year’s Mountainfilm theme is Awareness Into Activism. We’ve received an update on the activists, artists and adventurers converging this Memorial Day weekend for the festival. Here are some HT picks:
Andy Bichlbaum is a leading member of The Yes Men. He’s also a filmmaker and a performance artist who focuses on exposing corporate injustices by pretending to be working within the system. He co-directed the film The Yes Men Fix the World (Mountainfilm 2009), which brilliantly blurs the line between what is real and what is right.
Aaron Huey is a photojournalist – and a frequent guest at Mountainfilm – who freelances regularly for National Geographic, Harper’s, The New Yorker, Smithsonian Magazine, the New York Times and dozens of other publications. For more than five years, Aaron has been visiting the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and bearing witness through photography to its shocking poverty. This work was presented in a TEDx talk at University of Denver in September 2010.
Greg Mortenson returns to the festival this year as a judge. This adventurer-turned-activist is now world-famous because of his work building schools for girls in the Himalayas, chronicled in the remarkable best-seller Three Cups of Tea. But when he first came to Mountainfilm to see climbing films in 1980 (our second year), he was a self-described dirt bag who slept in his car.
To learn more about Mountainfilm, check out the short video above.
