The small but conspicuous coterie of film critics seen perambulating this year's Toronto Film Festival decked out in red-and-white "Vote For Pedro" t-shirts were not, despite the potential misunderstanding, expressing their undying love for Napoleon Dynamite. Rather, the Pedro in question was Pedro Costa, the 47-year-old Portuguese director whose sixth film, Colossal Youth, received its North American premiere at the festival. The shirts were the brainchild of the Canadian critic Mark Peranson, whose Cinema Scope magazine has been one of the most vocal supporters of Costa's film ever since its first, highly contentious screenings in Cannes, and who promised, in his most recent editor's note, still more Colossal Youth coverage to come. (And lest you jump to the conclusion — as some already have — that Costa is merely the latest pet cause of a few obscurantist critics who can't resists the urge to hold themselves above the "average" moviegoer, I should add that one of the other great enthusiasms of the current issue of Cinema Scope is none other than the Will Ferrell NSCAR comedy Talladega Nights.)

As I myself reported in these pages back in May, Colossal Youth, which runs two-and-a-half hours and "stars" a cast of real Cape Verdean immigrants enacting thinly fictionalized versions of their lives in a decaying Lisbon housing slum, isn't for everyone. In Cannes, where you expect to find people with an appetite for challenging cinema, the film sent droves of critics and other journalists streaming out of its first press screening and was said to have bitterly divided the Wong Kar-Wai-led jury between those who wanted the film to win the festival's top prize, the Palme d'Or, and those who thought it shouldn't get anything at all. (In the end, the latter camp triumphed.)

As for me, I will not contest the claim that Colossal Youth is demanding viewing. But I also feel it is a brave and nightmarishly beautiful achievement, in which marginalized people who so rarely have a voice in cinema are given one, unbound by the shackles of sanctimony or self-important "social realism." This is something close to the cinematic equivalent of blank verse, a new language of expression to which we must constantly readjust as the movie is playing across the screen. And like most radical achievements in the arts (The Rite of Spring, anyone?), its entrance into the world will continue to be greeted with hostility and derision.

Even in Toronto, Costa couldn't catch a break: The two public screenings of Colossal Youth were scheduled at inhospitable times for a long, difficult film (including one at 8:30 AM, in a festival where almost no film starts before 9:00). And on the day of the film's press screening, it became clear that the last reel of the print had been mistakenly subtitled into French instead of English. (At the public screenings, a flyer containing an English translation of the missing dialogue was handed out to ticket holders, who, of course, found it impossible to read in the dark.)

Still, the mere fact that Colossal Youth was even selected for Toronto ought to be considered a remarkable occurrence, given the film's absence from nearly all of the fall's major North American film festivals, including Telluride and New York, and excepting Vancouver. (And if you expect the film will turn up in L.A. during AFI Fest in November, don't get your hopes up.) That's a compelling reminder that, despite the easily gotten impression that it is little more than a glam press junket for some of the Hollywood's highest-profile fall releases, Toronto remains the largest and most important film festival in North America and — with more than 250 new feature-length films to choose from — no more or less than what each individual makes of it for his or her self.

To be sure, there are many critics and reporters who wing into town for Toronto's first weekend only to gorge themselves on those movies with confirmed U.S. distribution — or those that seem hot to sell — and to "bank" interviews with the talent (a term I use loosely) responsible for making them. (Perhaps more disconcerting, there are those newspaper and magazine editors who believe that's exactly what their critics and reporters should be using the festival for.) But Toronto is also where, in the course of a single day, I managed to see Syndromes and a Century, the latest work by the gifted young Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul; Belle Toujours, a 39-years-later sequel to Luis Buñuel's Belle de Jour, made by 97-year-old Portuguese director Manoel de Olivera; Paul Verhoeven's Blackbook, the first film the Robocop and Starship Troopers auteur has made in his native Holland in nearly 25 years; and Still Life, one of two new films by Chinese director Jia Zhangke being presented in Toronto this year.

For now, though, I will focus on the fifth film I saw on that dies mirabilis, because it is one likeliest to have missed the radar of even some of the more discriminating festivalgoers. It's called The Last Winter, and it's the latest slice of existential modern horror from writer-director (and sometimes actor) Larry Fessenden. I say latest because, though he is hardly a household name, Fessenden has spent much of the last 15 years putting his richly idiosyncratic and highly political spin on a series of timeless horror-fantasy myths. Indeed, it is often by virtue of what Fessenden does that we come to understand why those age-old scary stories have lost none of their creepy resonance over time. In No Telling (1991), Fessenden used the basic architecture of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as a means of weighing in on the debates over animal testing and the morality of science. In the Independent Spirit Award-winning Habit (1997), vampirism stood as a metaphor for dependency — chemical and emotional — and the alienation of modern life in the big city. And in Wendigo (2001) — Fessenden's best-known film to date — the titular creature may be a werewolf-like Native American spirit, but the real force wreaking havoc on its characters' lives is the clash between the ancient and the modern, between "civilized" man and his primal, animalistic nature.

These are not traditional monster movies by a long shot. Rather, like George Romero (whose own deconstructionist vampire movie, Martin, predates Habit by two decades), Fessenden is interested most in the collision of real and imagined horrors, and in the human impulse to fashion myths and legends as a way of giving meaning to a fundamentally shapeless world. The Last Winter is certainly no exception — much to the dismay, I suspect, of some of the clearly mystified acquisitions and distributions executives who wandered into the movie's Toronto press screening, clearly lured by the promises of "ghost story" and "supernatural horror" proffered by the description in the festival catalogue.

Set in remote Alaska, the film concerns an American oil company's top-secret drilling project, designed to bring "energy independence" to the American people while, quite possibly, wreaking havoc on the delicate environment of the Arctic tundra. Not that such warnings (most of them issued by a visiting scientist played by James Le Gros) do much to deter the drilling team's blustery leader (an excellent Ron Perlman) from blasting ahead with the project. Until, that is, some unseen, primordial force seems to bubble up from the ground along with that black gold, infecting everyone and everything with which it comes into contact. Could it be the spirit of the Wendigo yet again? Perhaps. But as usual in a Fessenden film, in The Last Winter mankind is its own worst enemy.

Filmed in Iceland in breathtaking 35mm widescreen, The Last Winter is Fessenden's biggest and most "professional" production to date, but in making that leap, the filmmaker has in no way compromised his artistic integrity. True to form, the movie is more about disquieting mood and serenely creepy atmosphere than about slam-bang action or shock-horror jolts. When people start to die, the survivors don't run around screaming in a hysterical panic, but rather rationally and intelligently weigh their options. And the final, apocalyptic moments are presented less as a "twist" than as the inevitable. The Last Winter won't create much "buzz" in the industry press and won't win many fans among those who place the saving of union jobs above the repairing of the ozone layer. But this is a horror movie with many inconvenient truths to tell about the ways in which we are willingly destroying our planet. Oh, and it's also scary as fuck.

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As the nation and the world marked the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, the program of this year's Toronto Film Festival offered no shortage of movies grappling uncomfortably with the current state of global affairs. In The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair, for example, filmmakers Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein add a troubling footnote to their 2004 Iraq documentary Gunner Palace by following up on the story of Yunis Khatayer Abbas, a journalist arrested in front of their cameras during the Gunner production and subsequently subjected to nine months of "interrogation" by U.S. forces at Abu Ghraib on specious charges that he was plotting to kill British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Elsewhere, British director Gabriel Range's D.O.A.P. (a.k.a. Death of a President) offered its own "documentary" portrait of a presidential assassination — specifically, the day that George W. Bush was assassinated by an unknown assailant outside of a Chicago hotel. And though it takes place some 30 years ago, in the thick of South Africa's anti-Apartheid movement, Philip Noyce's searing Catch a Fire couldn't help seeming like an allegory with its fact-based story of one ordinary man's unlikely conversion into a terrorist.

Of those films, D.O.A.P. has created the biggest festival stir: Even before it screened for the first time on Sunday night, one major daily newspaper was even rumored to be flying in its noted film critic from Los Angeles for the sole purpose of seeing the film, while another colleague told me he was sure he'd be fired by his editor if he didn't get a ticket for D.O.A.P.'s sold-out Sunday screening. All of which makes for a good news story, but does it make for a good movie? So far, reviews of the film are all over the map, from those that say it lives up to the hype to those that say it's all hype and nothing else. As for me, I elected to skip the crowds and catch up with D.O.A.P. at a later festival screening, once its initial 15 minutes in the pop-culture ether have subsided and the film can be better judged on its own merits (or lack thereof). In the meantime, one of the best films I have seen in Toronto is no less politically charged, even if the war it addresses isn't the one in Iraq, but rather the one unfolding within our own borders.

The movie is Lake of Fire, and it represents the culmination of some 15 years spent by the British commercials and music video director Tony Kaye canvassing the U.S. abortion debate. Traveling the country from Sioux Falls to Washington, D.C., Kaye surveys a broad range of alternately articulate and fanatical voices representing both sides of this deeply divisive issue, all of them presented by Kaye in the same non-judgmental light. There are hard-line extremists here, from Planned Parenthood advocates to the virulently anti-abortion Christian activist Randall Terry, but also a range of conflicted voices from the grey areas in-between, like veteran Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff (long one of the liberal lift's few outspoken pro-life pundits), attorney Alan Dershowitz (who discusses how his own views on abortion evolved after be became a parent) and — perhaps most intriguingly — one Norma McCorvey, a.k.a. "Jane Roe" from the landmark Roe v. Wade Supreme Court case, who since her conversion to Christianity has become an outspoken pro-life supporter herself. And then there are the many real abortion patients Kaye interviews, for whom abortion is less a political issue than a deeply personal one.

If Kaye's name rings a bell, it's because, back in 1998, his feature directorial debut, American History X, made Hollywood headlines as much for its gritty story about a reformed neo-Nazi skinhead (Edward Norton) as for the epic editing-room battles that reportedly ensued between Kaye, Norton and the film's studio, New Line Cinema. You may recall that a disgruntled Kaye went so far as to air his grievances in full-page ads in the pages of Variety and ultimately sued New Line in a failed attempt to have his name removed from the film's credits. (He wanted to be credited as Humpty Dumpty instead.) A few years later, Kaye's name surfaced in connection with another bizarre episode, when his planned project to film a documentary about a series of acting classes taught by Marlon Brando supposedly fell apart over Kaye's decision to show up for one filming session dressed as Osama Bin Laden. (As for Kaye's portly star, his costumes of choice were said to range from female drag to a priest's outfit.) All of which is to say that it's no wonder that critics and other industry people here in Toronto haven't exactly been clamoring to get a ticket for Kaye's latest opus. I mean: A two-and-a-half-hour, black-and-white abortion documentary directed by Humpty Dumpty? Get real! Even I only stumbled into Lake of Fire after first showing up to see a different film and getting shut out due to a capacity crowd.

There's no denying that Lake of Fire is long, a tad bombastic at times (like the burning candles and dirge-like music of the opening title sequence), deeply disquieting at others (there are abortion-related images here that most people hope to live their entire lives without seeing) and anything but salable to a large commercial audience. (We are a long way here from the audience-pleasing agitprop of a Michael Moore.) Yet it is also a resolutely intelligent, searching and unwaveringly balanced cross-section of the not-so-new America, where those who support total social freedom walk the same streets as those who feel that anyone who takes the Lord's name in vein should be summarily executed, and where tolerance for opposing belief systems exists in ever shorter supply. Make no mistake, Kaye suggests, we are living in times of civil war, and if you don't believe him, just look into the eyes of Emily Lyons, a nurse blinded and disfigured in the 1998 bombing of a Birmingham abortion clinic, and — whether you pity her or feel that she got what she deserved — try to feel otherwise.

At the opening night party of this year's Telluride Film Festival, the maverick film editor Walter Murch (one of this year's festival honorees) handed out fortune cookies containing not fortunes, but quotes from some of film history's leading figures. Mine contained the following, by the great French poet, playwright painter and filmmaker Jean Cocteau: "You must live in another world, where time and place are wholly yours: without newspapers, letters, telephone — without any contact with the outside." Cocteau wrote those words some 60 years ago, during the filming of his seminal screen version of Beauty and the Beast, but the sentiment has certainly lost none of its appeal in our media-choked times. Film festivals, of course, have a funny way of making time stand still, as the outside world falls away one day bleeds into the next, until a knock at the door reminds you that it's time to leave for the airport and begin the slow descent back into reality. That feeling is especially acute in Telluride, where, as I noted in the first of these blog posts, one consistently has the feeling of being in a place out of time. (Not for nothing is the festival's one-stop-shopping headquarters, information desk and memorabilia store located in a tent called Brigadoon.)

Even such places, alas, are not immune from the winds of change. So it was that Telluride 2006 came to close on a bittersweet note, with the announcement that Bill and Stella Pence would be retiring from their respective positions as Telluride co-director and managing director. It was in 1973 that Pence, a former Air Force man then working as a partner in the revered foreign-film distribution company Janus Films, was convinced by a fellow film enthusiast, George Eastman House head James Card, to use a property Pence owned — a renovated opera house in Telluride, Colorado — as the home for a festival focused on new and rarely-screened films. The rest, as they say, is history — 33 years of it, to be exact. Now, a new history will begin, with longtime festival programmer and board member Gary Meyer joining continuing Telluride co-founder and co-director Tom Luddy as Pence's successor.

For Telluride attendees old and new, it was hard not to agree with Monday's headline of the Telluride Daily Planet: "End of an era: Pences step down." And yet, aside from the letterhead and a few other cosmetic alterations, I doubt Telluride is in for too much of a makeover, and not just because Bill and Stella have already promised to stay on as consultants and to appear in Telluride each Labor Day weekend as the festival's resident cheerleaders. Meyer (who himself co-founded a little enterprise called Landmark Theatres once upon a time) is, to paraphrase frequent Telluride attendee Werner Herzog, one of the good soldiers of cinema, dedicated to the keeping the cinephilia flame and the seeking of new horizons on the world cinema landscape. So, as Telluride, Brigadoon and the Pences disappear into the mist, one can rest assured that they will all return 12 months from now to once again share with us their little slice of moviegoing nirvana.   

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Precisely because of its low-key, it's-all-about-the-movies vibe, the Telluride Film Festival has long been Hollywood's unofficial curtain-raiser to the fall moviegoing (and Oscar campaigning) season. In 2005, Brokeback Mountain and Capote both held their North American premieres here, while Walk the Line held its world premiere in Telluride a full week ahead of the Toronto Film Festival. This year, Secretary director Steven Shainberg is in town with the Nicole Kidman vehicle Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, a radical upending of bio-pic conventions that envisions the early years of the controversial photographer's career as something like Alice in Wonderland as staged by Luis Buñuel; the acclaimed Australian director Philip Noyce is premiering Catch a Fire, a true story cut from the cloth of South Africa's anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s, starring Derek Luke and Tim Robbins; and actor-director Todd Field is unveiling Little Children, his first feature since the Oscar-nominated In the Bedroom, based on a novel by Election author Tom Perrotta.

But the best new film I've seen in Telluride this year isn't new at all — or, rather, it isn't all new. It's called Directed By John Ford and it's a revision by director Peter Bogdanovich of his 1971 documentary of the same name, about the life and work of the great American filmmaker. The original version of the film has long enjoyed a somewhat mythic status among cinephiles, in part because, following a smattering of festival and television screenings, it was essentially withdrawn from circulation and hasn't been seen since. (The film's producer, the American Film Institute, neglected to obtain copyright clearances for any of the dozens of clips from Ford films, therefore making commercial distribution nigh impossible.) But by Bogdanovich's own admission, he was personally unhappy with the first incarnation of Ford, which, out of deference to Ford himself (who was still alive at the time), glossed over any discussion of the director's famously unhappy private life. So earlier this year, Bogdanovich went back into production, shooting new interviews with such avowed Ford admirers as Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood and Steven Spielberg and retooling the more essayistic portions of the film to deepen their portrait of Ford's off-screen character. (Among the choicest new bits: audio of a conversation between the dying Ford and his one-time lover, Katherine Hepburn.)

Prior to Telluride, I'd never seen Directed By John Ford before in any version, and my impression is that, now or then, it's a deeply impressive work of filmmaking and film criticism. Even at its most conventional, when Bogdanovich relies on talking-heads appreciations (retained from the 1971 version) from veteran Ford collaborators John Wayne, Henry Fonda and Jimmy Stewart, the film has an extraordinary vitality and intimacy, whereby you feel its subjects really opening up to Bogdanovich (who, by that point in his career, had already conducted long interviews with many of the same Hollywood icons for his famous series of Esquire profiles) about their brilliant but irascible director. That in itself is fairly remarkable in a day and age when most celebrity interviews seem the product of so much well-oiled publicity machinery and nobody has a critical or unkind word to say about anybody else. The most revealing section of Directed By John Ford comes later, though, when Bogdanovich, through a deft montage of film clips and lyrical voiceover narration (read by Orson Welles), offers up a profoundly moving survey of Ford's career-long juxtaposition of American family life against the turning tide of American history. When it's over, you leave the theater buzzing with renewed enthusiasm for the work of an American master artist. Ephemeral filmmaker tribute documentaries are a dime a dozen in the age of DVD extras and Turner Classic Movies, but Directed By John Ford is as massive and lasting a monument as the ones dotting Ford's indelible Western vistas.    

There may be no single person who better embodies the Telluride spirit than Pierre Rissient, a lifelong cinephile who has attended Telluride for nearly all of its 33 years and whose resume is as varied as the mountain climate. One of the storied film buffs who inhabited the hallowed halls of Henri Langlois' Cinematheque Française in the 1950s, Rissient has gone on to work as a filmmaker (he was assistant director on Godard's Breathless), distributor (of many neglected classics of American cinema that had never been released in France), publicist (in partnership with future director Bertrand Tavernier) and festival consultant (a capacity in which he has been responsible for discovering and/or popularizing the work of such disparate filmmakers as Jane Campion, Abbas Kiarostami and Hou Hsiao-Hsien). At Telluride and other festivals around the globe, he is simply "Pierre," a larger-than-life presence known for his vast T-shirt collection, his exhaustive knowledge of movie arcana and for impassioned maxims like, "It is not enough to love a film; one must love it for the right reasons!"  Yet for all that, Rissient has remained — largely by choice — something of a shadow figure, forever in the background, rarely awarded credit for his work.

In the words of chief Variety film critic Todd McCarthy, Rissient is "the least known enormously influential person in international cinema," but maybe not for much longer. Two years ago, McCarthy began work on a feature-length documentary about Rissient, scheduled to be completed in 2007. And this year, in Telluride, a selection of excerpts from McCarthy's film (including testimonials by the likes of Campion, Kiroastami, James Toback and Clint Eastwood) was shown at the grand opening of Le Pierre, a festival theater newly redesigned in Rissient's honor. The event will, I suspect, be remembered as one of the great Telluride evenings, right up there with the time Abel Gance came to town to show his silent epic Napoleon in its original three-screen projection format; or when Peter O'Toole and critic Roger Ebert engaged in an impromptu exchange of quotations by Yeats during O'Toole's career achievement ceremony; or, last year, when an 85-year-old Mickey Rooney fielded questions from the audience during a projection breakdown at a screening of the 1941 Rooney–Judy Garland musical Babes On Broadway. (And to commemorate the occasion, what else but specially designed T-shirts featuring Rissient's unmistakable profile in a white-line caricature?)

At the ceremony, Telluride co-director Bill Pence described Le Pierre as "a temple of cinephilia," and if that's true, then Rissient is certainly its high priest, its rabbi, its Sufi. For above and beyond his omnivorous appetite for cinema in all its forms, there is the fact that Rissient has been an extraordinary eyewitness to cinema history. In his years as a publicist and distributor, he befriended many of the then-surviving titans of the Golden Age of Hollywood, from John Ford, Otto Preminger and Raoul Walsh to blacklist victims Abraham Polonsky and Jospeh Losey. And on any given day, he will happily regale you with stories of their professional and private lives. Get on Pierre's good side and he may even tell you about the time the legendary German émigré director went to a Hollywood Blvd. porn theater to see Deep Throat.

But at 70, what impresses most about Rissient is his nearly childlike enthusiasm for the undiscovered, whether it be a forgotten relic from the margins of movie history (during a recent trip to L.A., he enthusiastically rushed to a screening of the 1953 3-D musical Those Redheads From Seattle) or a new work by one of the emerging talents of world cinema (at Cannes this year, he was a virtual one-man publicity machine for the superb documentary film Serambi, by the young Indonesian director Garin Nugroho). As Rissient told me himself in a 2005 interview — and I now know him well enough to know I should let him have the last word — "I am and always have been hungry for discoveries. Not only films, but the culture of other countries discovered through film. And that, in turn, has been a way of discovering myself and extending myself."

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In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that the Telluride Film Festival and I are not entirely disinterested parties. In 2004, when festival co-director Tom Luddy asked me to help organize that year's career tribute to the great Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos, I accepted the assignment and, in September, attended the festival for the first time — which, as anyone who has ever been to Telluride will tell you, is all that it takes to get hooked. That year, in addition to Angelopoulos, there were tributes to Laura Linney, French screenwriter Jean-Calude Carrière and the legendary casting director Fred Roos (complete with in-person appearances by George Lucas and Harrison Ford); a retrospective of films by the forgotten Czech director Gustav Machaty; a screening of Alfred Hitchcock's silent Blackmail, with live musical accompaniment from the Alloy Orchestra; and the world and/or North American premieres of Bad Education, Finding Neverland, House of Flying Daggers and Kinsey.

And those were just the movies! For half the splendor of Telluride is the place itself — an idyllic box canyon town located at an altitude of nearly 9,000 feet (some festival guests have been known to need supplemental oxygen), where Butch Cassidy scored his first major bank robbery and where Ayn Rand got the inspiration for the town of Galt's Gulch in Atlas Shrugged. It is one of the last corners of the known universe untouched by The Gap, Starbuck's and those other totems of globalization. And it is a place where romance seems to hang in the air: On my first visit, I met a girl who I ended up dating for the next six months and who remains a close friend; on hers, Laura Linney fell in love with a festival volunteer with whom she now lives, in Telluride, whenever she's not making a film.

In 2005 and now 2006, I've had the great good fortune of being asked back to Telluride, as the contributor of essays to the festival program, the presenter of certain films and the moderator of post-screening Q&As. But lest you think I'm completely on the take, allow me to clarify: For my work here, I am rewarded with a festival pass and a hotel room, but everything else — including a plane ticket roughly the cost of a round-trip to Europe — is on me. (And if you think I feel any persuasion to be kind to the new films I see here, remember that it was here, in 2004, that I famously said "no" to British director Sally Potter's film Yes.)

That's part of a longstanding Telluride tradition by which all festivalgoers are created equal and freebies are doled out to almost nobody — especially journalists, publicists and industry executives. That, plus an annual Labor Day weekend date nestled smack between Venice and Toronto, has allowed Telluride to keep itself intimate (attendance hovers around 3,000 — roughly the year-round population of the town itself) and immune from the hype and media frenzy that attend that other mountain-town festival located just across the border in Utah. Oh, and did I mention that the festival doesn't even announce its program until opening day? And that, even afterwards, there are additional "sneak previews" and "surprise screenings" yet to be unveiled? (In 1994, Telluride audiences queued up for just such an event only to find themselves in the first public audience for Tim Burton's Ed Wood.)

Simply put, there aren't many (or maybe any) film festivals that one would pay out of one's own pocket to work for. But Telluride (now in its 33rd year) is worth that, and then some. In a mere three-and-a-half days, one can take a more extensive cinematic tour — from the very birth of cinema to neglected modern masterpieces to the very latest from the world's leading directors — than is possible at most festivals that run two or three times as long. And one can do it amongst a community of fellow film-lovers, who make little distinction between, say, Brokeback Mountain (which had its North American premiere in Telluride last year mere hours after making its world premiere in Venice) and a rare screening of The Sentimental Bloke, one of the only surviving works of the silent Australian cinema (and one of the indisputable highlights of this year's program). So, like the town against which it unfolds, the Telluride Film Festival is a remnant of another era — when movies were shared cultural experiences rather than disposable pop commodities — and a beacon of hope in what are dark days for American film culture.

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