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Libby Arts Residential Academic Program  students say experience changed their lives

Like the town that bears its name, The Telluride Film Festival has taken only four decades to grow from relatively obscure mining community to frequent landing place of stars. Some of the biggest names in celluloid live part time in Telluride, and Oscar winners “Juno” and “Slumdog Millionaire” premiered at the Telluride Film Festival, which just made its 37^th appearance.

Dwarfed by the San Juan Mountains, which soar thousands of feet skyward on three sides of the Telluride Valley floor, the place is as much a visual feast as are the films lucky enough to be shown there. This fall, 20 University of Colorado students devoured both.

The students, many of them film majors, are members of the Libby Arts Residential Academic Program, a “living and learning community” for students interested in visual and performing arts. The experience, many of them say, changed their lives.

“In a weekend, we got lifelong experiences that we could not be taught in school,” says James Gilbert, a film-studies major.

That seems clear. The students spent Labor Day weekend previewing top-echelon films, listening to actors and directors discuss and debate their works and even having a private conversation with Director Peter Sellars and Actress Laura Linney.

The excursion was the idea of Janet Robinson, Libby’s associate director and an instructor. When she joined Libby’s staff, she started making strides toward the field trip.

Last year, Robinson attended the festival by herself “to get the lay of the land.” She spoke with the festival’s staff, which was encouraging. The festival even agreed to set up a two-hour Friday-afternoon session, arranged especially for the CU students, led by notable filmmakers or actors.

Robinson garnered the support of Deborah Haynes, professor of art and art history and director of the Libby program. Haynes agreed to dedicate the funds for the trip, and Robinson spent much of the next year preparing, starting with the basic issue of securing lodging. Michael Shernick, Libby program assistant, provided “invaluable” help.

It wasn’t until a week before the event that students learned that Sellars and Linney were the featured speakers.

Such uncertainty is the modus operandi of the Telluride Film Festival, which does not announce its program until the morning of opening day—Friday of Labor Day weekend—and which also sneaks in some unannounced appearances. In 2007, “Juno” was one of them. The next year, “Slumdog Millionaire” was another.

This year, an unannounced “sneak” appearance was Director Danny Boyle’s “127 Hours,” which, by all reports, vividly recreates the ordeal of Aaron Ralston. Ralston’s arm was crushed and trapped by a falling rock in a Utah canyon in 2003.

He survived by cutting off his arm with a dull pocket knife, rappelling off a cliff wall with his one remaining hand, walking toward the trailhead and being rescued by helicopter.

Ralston attended the premiere showing, as did Boyle, who directed “Slumdog Millionaire.” Students heard both of them speak and even got to meet them and ask questions.

“You don’t get as much time (as with an hour-long meeting), but you still get a chance to talk to them,” Robinson says. “Anyone they wanted to meet, they could meet.”

That’s a rare opportunity for young film connoisseurs. The list of film personages in Telluride included eminent directors Werner Herzog, Ken Burns, Peter Weir, Darren Aronofsky and actors James Franco and Colin Firth.

The other “sneak” preview was of “Black Swan,” directed by Aronofsky, whose “Requiem for a Dream” was a critical though not commercial success.

The New York Times, which also attended the Telluride Film Festival, described “Black Swan” as a “backstage melodrama that often plays like a horror movie.” The film, which Robinson said many of her students listed as their favorite, will be released in December and is described as a thriller that “zeroes in on the relationship between a veteran ballet dancer and a rival.”

Robinson and the Libby students plan to see the film again when it is released. Film critics have been suggesting that “Black Swan” is an Oscar contender.

Students also saw Firth’s portrayal of King George VI, the British monarch during World War II. The king’s struggle with a speech impediment is the subject of “The King’s Speech,” which was another buzz-generating film in Telluride.

The Libby students returned to Boulder energized, and many created their own remembrances of the event. They produced short films, wrote several haikus and even immortalized the weekend with an original rap song.

Student Michaela Simon says it was a peak experience. “Not only did we get to meet all these famous directors, but we got to hear insight on most of the movies that we saw.”

Simon was especially impressed with Linney, an Academy-Award-nominated actress who discussed, among other things, the challenge of portraying Abigail Adams, who was married to John Adams.

While preparing for that role, Linney walked pigeon-toed, because Adams did. “It tells me how far professionals go to get that embodiment” of the character, Simon observes.

Louis Zeller, a film-studies major, says the experience reaffirmed what he wants to do in life. “It’s so easy to get lost in college, to be intimidated by how daunting the rest of your life is.”

But those thoughts melted a bit in Telluride, where Zeller was surrounded by people brought there by their passion for cinema.

And film-studies student Molly Enright found both inspiration and hope in Telluride, particularly with short films, which she says “were so amazing and could have been movies in and of themselves.”

“When you’re a student, it’s not like you’re making feature films,” she adds. “Seeing all of those short films really showed me that it is possible.”

As he accepted the festival’s Silver Medallion, Firth showed a similar sense of wonder and appreciation. He said: “The last time I was in Colorado, I was 12 years old, and I was with my family. And the sight of this extraordinary part of the world produced something which, I suppose for the first time, amounted to what felt like a spiritual experience.  … I came away feeling religious, and it’s taken me years to shake that off.

“Three days here have put me right back where I started. And to be here in a place like this, feeling giddy with appreciation and delight and altitude, surrounded by some of the people I admire most in the world, fills me with a profoundly unspiritual sense of satisfaction and gratification.”

Libby’s students might well say, “Hear, hear.”

To learn more about the Libby Arts Residential Academic Program, see. To see the Libby students’ reflections on the Telluride Film Festival in haiku and other verse, click .