Muhammad Muzammal
ASSISTANT ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT EDITOR

Surrounded by a gorgeous, expansive mountain range, the Telluride Film Festival played host to the best film artists in the world.

This historic film event, whose unique artistic sensibility (an antithesis of the larger, more commercial global film festivals such as Cannes or Toronto), attracted acclaimed filmmakers such as Danny Boyle (“Slumdog Millionaire”) and Todd Haynes (“Far from Heaven”) to display their outstanding work.

Films such as “Suffragette” and “Steve Jobs” had their world premieres at Telluride and several other low-key movies were screened for the first time as well.

Assembled through Telluride’s 27 Student Symposium, a program that is as rigorous as it is selective, this group included 50 collegiate-level students – both undergraduate and graduate – internationally chosen to finish the Symposium’s program.

Over the course of the festival’s four-day window, students followed an intensive schedule, viewing four to five films a day and attending discussions with the corresponding creators of the films.

In these discussions, students broke down the films analytically and critically, assessing elements such as cinematography, sound design and writing.

From the 50 students chosen this year, two represented Hofstra University: senior David Yurman and junior Muhammad Muzammal (who is also the symposium’s first two-time attendee and the author of this piece). Joining Yurman and Muzammal were Hofstra graduate students Ethan McGee and Dongli Eric Ye, who were selected for the festival’s first ever cinephile scholarship program.

Guest directors offered the cinephile scholars a pass to a special slate of programs including classic film restorations, silent films and selections.

Films that were screened for both cinephiles and symposium students included “Ixcanul,” a Guatemalan film about an indigenous Mayan teenager faced with a pregnancy crisis. “Ixcanul” was an impressive debut, directed by first time writer/director Jayro Bustamente.

One of the festival’s highlights for the students included a private screening of “Anomalisa,” the new animated film from writer/director Charlie Kaufman (of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”), who, with his Adult Swim co-director Duke Johnson, created a bizarrely entertaining film about a lonely middle-aged man longing for a human connection.

The guests who spoke to the students included novelist Rachel Kushner (writer of “The Flamethrowers” and serving as guest director of the festival), opera director Peter Sellars (who has directed several modernized operas), director Todd Haynes (director of the piece “Carol”), silent film restorer Serg Bromberg (who has restored hundreds of lost silent films) writer/director Jayro Bustamente (of the aforementioned “Ixcanul”) and documentarian Charles Ferguson (of the Oscar-winning documentary “Inside Job” and the upcoming, powerful climate change documentary “Time to Choose”).

In meeting these special and distinguished artists, the students gained insight into cinema like they never did before.

At an open air panel discussion, which included actors Meryl Streep, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams and Geza Rohrig, the topic of film as a social force was discussed. Sitting to the far right was Lazlo Nemes, who debuted his first film, the disturbingly sublime “Son of Saul,” a Holocaust drama that had affected the Telluride audience in more ways than one.

A question was directed towards Nemes – why pick to do a debut film on a controversial subject such as the Holocaust? Nemes explained, with a slight pain in his voice, that genocide and extermination of millions of people was not exclusive to a bygone era. Genocide, as is readily shown in Nemes’ film, exposes a breakdown of humanity that still viciously continues to this day, with terrorism and war.

The other panelists agreed with Nemes, especially director Sarah Gavron, whose “Suffragette” brought forth the struggle for women’s rights in Britain in the early 20th century. The heavy popularity of “Suffragette” within the festival showed signs that the world was not afraid to look back at the harsh truths of its past.

This screening, along with the panel discussions and the intimate symposium discussions, demonstrated the power of cinema and the ideas that make the Telluride Film Festival the great artistic arena it is.

The students, who had roughed it for the festival’s time span, left with both confident and humbled demeanors.

This beautiful paradox can only result from the magical grandeur of Telluride. Through their time spent at the symposium, students were both inspired and mesmerized.