During his 2020 Academy Award acceptance speech for Best Picture, “Parasite” director Bong Joon Ho said, “Once you overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.” True to this statement, five out of six of the features at Telluride at Dartmouth this year were foreign-language films. In the annual festival from Sept. 17 to Sept. 21, the Hopkins Center for the Arts screened movies from the Labor Day Telluride Film Festival in Telluride, Colo. — an event that has a longstanding partnership with Dartmouth.
The Hop’s director of programming initiatives Johanna Evans ’10 explained that this volume of foreign-language films in the lineup was unusual and not intentional. She added that the Hop tries to choose Telluride films that are “relevant” to students.
She said that the language of the film was less important.
“The language barrier is not the thing that cinema is really about, [but] what is the film about?” Evans said.
The foreign-language films this year included the Norwegian comedy drama “Sentimental Value,” the Brazilian political thriller “The Secret Agent,” the Italian political drama “La Grazia” and two French films — the mystery “A Private Life” and comedy drama “Nouvelle Vague.” The lone English-language feature was the comedy drama “Jay Kelly.”
After a two-year absence, the festival returned to the Hop. While the arts center was under renovation, Telluride had shown films in the Black Family Visual Arts Center at the Loew Auditorium, which has significantly less seating.
Attendance this year was high. The “Telluride Pass,” which gives access to all six showings, sold out less than two days after becoming available to the general public, according to the Hop Box Office.
Professor of German studies Gerd Gemünden — who is currently writing a book on the director of “The Secret Agent” — attributed an increased interest in international films in the U.S. to their greater availability on streaming platforms.
“Netflix in the United States is very international now, addressing particularly the large Spanish-speaking population,” Gemünden said. “And then of course, through MUBI and Criterion and so many other platforms … you can access this global cinema more easily.”
At the same time, Gemünden highlighted that this global business model can be difficult for international filmmakers.
“If you define filmmaking as something that benefits a national and local culture, then these streamers are freeloaders,” Gemünden said.
On Sept. 29, President Trump called for tariffs on 100% of films produced outside of the United States on Truth Social. Gemünden said he was uncertain whether such tariffs are even feasible because films today are often international projects.
Still, Evans expressed her belief that the art form is not “dying.”
“I think we’re in a moment where people really want to go do something where they know they're going to run into other people … [and] participate in an experience that other people will have shared and will be able to talk about it with them afterwards,” she said.
Evans acknowledged that the volume of content right now makes it harder to have that “shared experience.”
In any case, she said, “It is one of the things that I think makes Telluride at Dartmouth special for our community.”
