Telluride Film Festival returns with a wide-ranging slate and a secret premiere

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Set us as preferred When the 53rd Telluride Film Festival kicks off Friday high in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains, its lineup will span family rupture and sumo wrestling, AIDS and rock stardom, with films touching on astronomy, Rupert Murdoch and extraterrestrial biker gangs — a typically wide-ranging mix for a festival that likes to keep audiences guessing.For festival director Julie Huntsinger, the films share less a theme than a feeling.“Tenderness is something that I see in a lot of the movies,” she says.

“This is a very heartbreaking, tender year.”Telluride’s intimacy is part of its peculiar power.Smaller and scruffier than the annual film events of Venice, Toronto or New York, the four-day festival has no competition or juried prizes and keeps its lineup secret until the last minute.

Celebrities trade red-carpet formality for jeans and flannel, while audiences crisscross town between screenings in a high school auditorium, a Masonic lodge, the county courthouse and half a dozen other spaces pressed into service for the week.For a festival that can feel this homespun, its awards-season footprint is remarkably large.

Last year, five of the 10 eventual best picture Oscar nominees screened there: “Hamnet,” “Bugonia,” “Sentimental Value,” “The Secret Agent” and “Frankenstein.”This year there are fewer obvious awards heavyweights in the mix, at a time when prestige and independent films have become harder to finance, distribute and sell to audiences.Then again, Telluride has never depended entirely on known quantities; films such as “Slumdog Millionaire” and “Moonlight” arrived with relatively modest expectations and left as major contenders.“It’s such a quintessential Telluride lineup,” Huntsinger says of this year’s eclectic program.

“They kind of always feel that way bec...