Mountainfilm Blog

Mountainfilm in Telluride festival director David Holbrooke recently met up with activist Tim DeChristopher who will return to the Telluride, Colorado, for the festival this year. Familiar to Mountainfilm audiences as a guest and the subject of the 2012 award-winning film Bidder 70, DeChristopher was sentenced in July 2011 to two years in prison for disrupting an auction of federal land. After serving terms in Herlong Federal Prison in California and Englewood in Colorado, he is now finishing the remainder of his sentence in a halfway house in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Tim DeChristopher and I sat down at a diner in downtown Salt Lake City. Our waitress came over and ignored me, but she looked at him several times and said, “You look really familiar.”

DeChristopher replied, “I get that a lot.”

She looked harder at him and asked, “Have you been in here a lot recently?”

DeChristopher responded, “No, it's been a couple years.”

Maybe you’ve never submitted to a festival and are hesitant to put your hard work out there, only to be crushed by denial letters. Maybe you’ve had films in other festivals but don’t know if Mountainfilm is the right fit. Maybe you’re wondering why entry fees are so high.

Below are some frequently asked questions that we receive at Mountainfilm in Telluride. For more details specific about Mountainfilm’s selection process, read Program Director Emily Long’s blogs: “How to Get a Film Accepted,” “The Secrets of Film Festival Selection” and “Making a Film is Only Half the Battle.”

Note: Most of the specific questions about fees, deadlines, process and method for submitting to Mountainfilm in Telluride are listed on our website on the Submit a Film page.

Mountainfilmin Telluride sent Festival Director David Holbrooke and Program Director Emily Long to Park City, Utah, to the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. Holbrooke’s report from the festival follows:

Dazzling and intense, enervating and exhausting, there’s nothing quite like Sundance. It’s a convention of sorts for the indie film industry with big parties and bigger deals happening all around town. This makes it hard to focus on the films, but Emily and I saw as much as we could. We were both impressed with the quality of this year’s documentaries. Many of the non-fiction films at Sundance this year are big, muscular films — well-crafted, quick-moving docs that tell stories in a compelling way.

We recently posted a link on our Facebook page about Concord, Massachusetts, being one of the first communities in the U.S. to ban the sale of single-serving water bottles, and someone responded, “Why don’t you just make it mandatory to recycle?” Good question. If only it were that simple. Unfortunately, recycling plastic isn’t easy. It comes in many forms that can’t be comingled, and the process is further complicated by additives (reinforcements, fillers, and colorants). In sum: Recycling plastic is expensive. It’s often cheaper to make new plastic than to recycle.

Sustainable investing isn’t new, but the concept is gaining widespread attention through 350.org’s Do the Math tour— which campaigns to cut off the fossil fuel’s financial and political support by divesting our schools, churches and government from the industry. With that momentum, perhaps it’s time to take a look at our own investments to see if they support companies that are leading the way and making sustainable business decisions.

If you own stock in fossil fuel or other questionable industries, divestment isn’t necessarily the only option. Grist recently addressed this issue in letter to Ask Umbra, who addresses green-living questions, titled “Should I Sell My Exxon Stock?”, and the answer isn’t necessarily simple.

It seems like, for one reason or another, some of us aren’t getting enough turns in this winter. It doesn’t matter whether it’s injuries, low snowfall, misaligned priorities or the simple fact that there’s no such thing as “enough turns.” We just need a fix.

So if you’ve got 6.5 minutes to spare, here are a few vicarious powder shots, courtesy of Ben Sturgulewski of Sweetgrass Productions. This film, Last Light, was shot entirely during what’s called “the magic hour” while touring the backcountry in Haines, Alaska, with three rippers.

To find more shorts like this, visit Mountainfilm in Telluride’s Shorts page, where we’ve aggregated more ski films and other great favorites from past festivals that you can stream to your computer.

Natural Gas has become a flash point in the nation because enormous swaths of the country hold huge underground deposits of the fossil fuel. Mountainfilm in Telluride Festival Director David Holbrooke recently attended a rally in Albany, New York, to encourage New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo to maintain a moratorium on fracking in the state. This is David Holbrooke’s report from the event.

“I’m an environmentalist — that’s why I am for natural gas,” said my stepfather as I picked up my mother to go to Albany for a demonstration opposing drilling in New York state. I replied, “I don’t have time to talk about it now, but I look forward to the conversation.”

It seems like lots of people are talking about natural gas these days, including my stepfather who I love and respect. A loud and boisterous contingent met in Albany last Wednesday outside the hall where Governor Cuomo was giving his State of the State address. Mostly, it was a coalition of farmers, young people and families who were trying to get Cuomo to keep the current fracking moratorium in place.