In addition to many of the films from the Telluride festival, Mountain Summit is Coloradoans' first chance to see The Tillman Story, director Amir Bar-Lev's acclaimed documentary about the Arizona Cardinals safety who famously left the NFL to enroll in the Army after the September 11 attacks, his death in Afghanistan under "friendly fire", the military cover-up of the circumstances of his death, and his family's desperate search for the truth in the aftermath. "My team and I came to the 2010 festival in Telluride with a very critical eye to select the cream of the crop for Aspen," reports Gram Slaton, Executive Director of the Wheeler Opera House. "We were blown away by the quality of virtually every film we saw and special guest we listened to. So our short list was very exciting. Amazingly, we're getting everything on our wish list and even an extra, The Tillman Story, a film about NFLer Pat Tillman's death in Afghanistan, that hadn't been available for the festival in May." Check out the trailer below:
For other items on the ticket, keep scrolling:
Eastern Rises: The Kamchatka peninsula in the Russian Far East may as well be at the end of the earth. Its enormous, wild landscape is threaded with rivers, swimming with massive mouse-eating trout, and swarming with bugs and bears. In other words, it's the Holy Grail for truly obsessed, halfway insane fly fishermen. With filmmakers Ben Knight and Frank Smethurst in person.
Freedom Riders: In 1961, an earnest but innocent group of young men and women, black and white, set out from Washington DC to test the Supreme Court's 1960 anti-segregation decision by traveling through the South and eating together. This quiet protest against racism provoked vicious attacks by angry mobs and arrests by racist police, but the Freedom Riders stuck to their Gandhi-inspired principles of non-violence and changed the course of civil rights in America forever. With Freedom Rider Dr. Rip Patton in person.
Gasland: The U.S. sits on a huge concentration of natural gas, making it the Saudi Arabia of this critical energy source. The good news is that we don't have to depend on foreign countries for this commodity, but the bad news is that natural gas is difficult to extract from the ground. And that extraction can bring nightmares: pools of toxic waste that kill cattle and vegetation, cats with fur falling out in clumps, families suffering unexplainable illnesses and ignitable kitchen faucets. With director Josh Fox in person.
Minds of Mountainfilm - Tom Shadyac from Mountainfilm in Telluride on Vimeo
I Am: Tom Shadyac, director of top-grossing comedies such as Ace Ventura, Liar Liar, The Nutty Professor, and Bruce Almighty and longtime friend of Mountainfilm in Telluride, presents an autobiographical documentary that is both an introspective journey about happiness and a larger commentary on the American Dream, questioning why we're more prosperous today than ever, yet apparently less happy. With Tom Shadyac in person.
Sons of Perdition: The Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints is an offshoot sect of the Mormon Church that practices polygamy. Aside from the moral issues, polygamy in such a small community has one terrible mathematical flaw: There are never going to be enough young females, and there will always be too many young males. This film tracks the lives of four boys from Colorado City, Utah, who are expelled from their families because they threaten the older men's hold on the young women. With director Tyler Measom and members of the cast in person.
The 10 Conditions of Love: Once the richest woman in China, Rebiya Kadeer is the exiled leader of the Uygher people who live in China's Xinjiang Province. This oil-rich area has been referred to as "The Other Tibet" because its people are fighting for autonomy under a repressive Chinese regime. After spending six years in a Chinese prison for "terrorism," Kadeer now lives in the U.S., where she stages a relentless human-rights campaign for her people. Three of her sons have been imprisoned by China, and this personal cost is too much for her daughter, Raela Tosh, who rues the pain her mother's activism has caused the family. With Rebiya Kadeer and Raela Tosh in person.
Moving Mountains Symposium on Extinction: There have been five previous eras of extinction on this planet. Today, we are living in the sixth era, also known as the Holocene Extinction, which is the first extinction to be caused by humans. It's the natural order of life on this planet that, over millions of years, species evolve and die. When the rates of extinction are as high as they are today, however -- with a species dying off every twenty minutes -- there is real cause for concern. With Steve Winter, Stuart Pimm, Jeffrey Parrish, Louis Psihoyos and Eric Sanderson
