Telluride film festival guest directors


The Guest Director position is held by a different individual each year who is invited by the Telluride Film Festival Directors to join them in the creation of the festival program. The guest director serves as a key collaborator in all of the festival's programming decisions, bringing new ideas and, quite often, overlooked films to Telluride. Below is a list of each guest director followed by the films the director specifically chose to highlight.

Guest Directors

  1. 1988 - Donald Richie chose: Japan's Cutting Edge, a 2-hour collection of Japanese film dating from 1981-1988 and Remembering Sessue Hayakawa, a two film montage of this film great's first roles in the 1914 film Wrath of the Gods and the 1919 film The Dragon Painter
  2. 1989 - Errol Morris chose: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and Make Way for Tomorrow
  3. 1990 - Bertrand Tavernier chose: Justin de Marseille and Pursued
  4. 1991 - Laurie Anderson chose: Danzon and New Video Art, the first video projection program at the festival which included a series of modern video shorts.
  5. 1992 - G. Cabrera Infante chose: Laughter, Victims of Sin and La Virgen de la Caridad
  6. 1993 - John Boorman chose: Fear and Desire, Upstage
  7. 1994 - John Simon The Easy Life ,One Fine Day and They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
  8. 1995 - Phillip Lopate
  9. 1996 - B. Ruby Rich
  10. 1997 - Peter Von Bagh
  11. 1998 - Peter Bogdanovich
  12. 1999 - Peter Sellars
  13. 2000 - Edgardo Cozarinsky
  14. 2001 - Salman Rushdie chose: Metropolis, Alphaville, and Solaris
  15. 2002 - Alberto Barbera chose: Bitter Rice, Bandits of Orgosolo and Il Posto
  16. 2003 - Stephen Sondheim chose: La Belle Equipe, Carnet du Bal and Panique
  17. 2004 - Buck Henry
  18. 2005 - Don DeLillo chose: The Passenger, Wanda, The Spirit of the Beehive
  19. 2006 - J. P. Gorin chose: Maldone, Remorques, Lumière d'Ètè
  20. 2007 - Edith Kramer chose: The Way You Wanted Me, Millions Like Us, Marie, a Hungarian Legend
  21. 2008 - Slavoj Zizek
  22. 2009 - Alexander Payne
  23. 2010 - Michael Ondaatje
  24. 2011 - Caetano Veloso
  25. 2012 - Geoff Dyer chose: Baraka, Beau Travail, The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner, Lessons of Darkness, Stalker, Together, Unrelated
  26. 2013 - 40th year of Festival. Don Delillo - La Morte Rouge + The Zapruder Film, Buck Henry - The Terminal Man, Phillip Lopate - Naked Childhood, Michael Ondaatje - La Jetee + Elephant, B Ruby Rich - One Way or Another, Salman Rushdie - Mahanagar
  27. 2014 - and Guy Maddin chose: California Split, Il Grido, M , Man's Castle The Road to Glory, Wicked Woman
  28. 2015 - Rachel Kushner chose: The Mother and the Whore, Mes Petites Amoureuses, Wake in Fright, Cocksucker Blues, A Day in the Country, Uncle Yanco, Une Bonne à Tout Faire, The Mattei Affair
  29. 2016 - Volker Schlöndorff chose: I Was Nineteen, The Fire Within, The Barefoot Contessa, Les Enfants Terribles, Spies
  30. 2017 - Joshua Oppenheimer
  31. 2018 - Jonathan Lethem