The Telluride Film Festival (TFF), distinctive for announcing its annual lineup the night before the festival begins, celebrated its 51st edition from August 30 to September 2, 2024. Not only was the festival’s guest director this year a Sloan grantee – Kenneth Lonergan, whose STARRY MESSENGER (2006) won a Tribeca Institute Sloan Filmmaker Fund Production Award – but the Foundation’s film program was represented within the festival itself. The 2024 lineup included two Sloan-funded documentaries. Read more about the projects below, with descriptions quoted from the festival programmers.
LEONARDO DA VINCI. Dir. Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, David McMahon. “Few historical figures loom larger in our modern consciousness than Leonardo da Vinci—whose legend has only grown in the 500 years since his death—and no single work in the Leonardo literature has achieved the cumulative force of Ken Burns’ latest opus [. . .] LEONARDO immerses us into a propulsive stream of big ideas inside a metaverse of imagery [. . .] a joyous, inspirational energy, a reminder of our human potential.”
LEONARDO DA VINCI received a Sloan grant in 2023 and will air on PBS November 18 and 19, 2024.
THE WHITE HOUSE EFFECT. Dirs. Bonni Cohen, Pedro Kos, Jon Shenk. “Using an astounding array of archival footage, THE WHITE HOUSE EFFECT tells the story— complete with White House intrigue and political one-upmanship—of the environmentalist-turned-EPA-head William Reilly, who finds himself at odds with George H.W. Bush’s Machiavellian chief of staff John Sununu. The outcomes of their clashes will have truly planetary repercussions. Brilliantly constructed, with a cinematically unsettling score by Ariel Marx, the film will grab the attention even of audiences who think they’ve seen it all when it comes to impending global disasters . . .”
Still from THE WHITE HOUSE EFFECT. Courtesy of TFF.
THE WHITE HOUSE EFFECT received a Sloan grant in 2024. Following its world premiere at Telluride, a private screening of the film recently kicked off the 2024 Climate Film Festival with an introduction by Al Gore.
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