By Isabel Sadurni

If you took a plane to Denver, then a charter flight to Montrose or Grand Junction and then a jitney through and over the San Juan mountain range of southwestern Colorado, then down into a forested, steep canyon, you would arrive in the small mountain village of Telluride, site of one of the most highly revered film festivals in the world. You might think you could arrive more easily to a film festival, and you can, at others, but the pilgrimage-like voyage filters out all but the most faithful cinephiles, and, as several 30-year-plus strong devotees of Telluride ask, why would you want to attend any other film festival?

The headline news for the 33rd Telluride Film Festival (Sept. 1-4) was the departure of co-directors and co-founders Bill and Stella Pence. Filmmaker Werner Herzog, an attendee for the last 32 years who has also premiered several of his films at Telluride, publicly honored the Pences this year by describing the festival as his annual destination to “recharge and tune his creative compass.” Subsequently, filmmaker Ken Burns, a longtime sponsor and volunteer, led a cheer in their honor and announced co-director and founder Tom Luddy’s continuation alongside Gary Meyer, specialized film exhibitor, distributor, programmer and curator.

This year’s festival spotlighted German filmmaker Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s feature debut, The Lives of Others, a human drama about the gradual disillusionment of a Stasi officer assigned to spy on celebrated artists in East Berlin in 198l. Kevin Macdonald, best known for his docudramas Touching the Void and One Day in September, premiered his first fiction film, The Last King of Scotland, which features a tour de force performance by Forest Whitaker as the charismatic Ugandan monster dictator Idi Amin. Those lucky enough to attend a screening of Turner Classics’ Directed by John Ford with subsequent Q&A were treated to director Peter Bogdanovich’s impeccable John Ford, Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda and John Wayne impressions in his telling of several anecdotes about the making of the film and his correspondence with Ford over the course of Bogdonavich’s making of The Last Picture Show and beyond.

Rolf de Heer, little known to the Western world, is an Australian director of provocative and politically charged films. He presented my top pick from the festival, an astonishing interpretation of a parable of the Ganalbingu people called Ten Canoes. Winner of the Special Jury Prize at Cannes, de Heer’s work was created through an intense partnership with the Ganalbingu. The first feature film to be shot entirely in the Australian aboriginal language, it demonstrates de Heer’s activist spirit and firmly establishes him as one of world cinema’s most innovative and independent voices.

What came as a surprise was the bounty of films from Romania, apparently the official new hotbed of international art cinema. Corneliu Porumboiu’s Caméra d’Or winner at Cannes, 12:08 East of Bucharest, led a small pack of films from the Carpathian Mountain territories. The film is a tragicomedy depicting a small town’s remembrance of the fall of socialist dictator Ceausescu via a call-in television show. One television guest, a fatalistic aging widower, delivers the film’s thesis: “One makes whatever revolution one can, each in their own way.” Radu Jude’s The Tube With a Hat, made for Romanian television, stood apart as an exceptional short about a father and son’s distanced relationship in which love is bartered over the course of a journey to repair an old television.

Other noteworthy shorts included Film Noir, a display of optical-printing brio by Osbert Parker, and Carmichael & Shane, a hilarious mockumentary, made by Australian filmmakers Alex Weinress and Robert Carlton, about the taboo parenting choice of favoring one child over another.

Editing and sound-design god Walter Murch was this year’s recipient of the Silver Medallion Award. During the second of the tributes I attended, he held his own version of a sound-editing master class during which he outlined his process for arriving at crucial decisions in the making of The Godfather — a rare treat and worth the trek alone.

Telluride attendee Pierre Rissient was honored this year with the baptism of a newly redesigned theater named in his honor, Le Pierre. Todd McCarthy, chief Variety film critic, was on hand at the grand opening to celebrate with a selection of clips from his upcoming feature documentary on Rissient, due out in 2007. Rissient, known for his impassioned maxims like “It is not enough to love a film; one must love it for the right reasons!” and with a résumé as tall, esteemed and varied as the San Juans (he’s recognized as everything from the a.d. on Godard’s Breathless to the person who discovered and popularized Jane Campion, Abbas Kiarostami and Hou Hsiao-hsien), he seemed the perfect embodiment of the Telluride spirit.

Telluride’s relationship with the BBC produced perhaps the only American screening of Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, director Simon Curtis’s filmic incarnation of Patrick Hamilton’s semiautobiographical novel, which tells the story of three emotionally wrecked characters pursuing love against the backdrop of dreary 1930s London. Hamilton, the author of Rope, Gaslight and Hangover Square, was an influence on such filmmakers as Hitchcock, and the selection of Twenty Thousand Streets in the year of Hamilton’s centenary supports Telluride’s dedication to spotlighting cinema’s less-celebrated historical contributors.

As we enter the age of home theaters and online cinema, Telluride champions the shared experience of viewing celluloid in an old-fashioned theater. Charlie Kerr, a schoolteacher from Grand Junction, summed up the spirit of the festival: “I once thought that people were crazy for watching movies in a dark room when they could be hiking outside. Now I understand why.”