The Telluride Film Festival (TFF) is a film festival held annually in Telluride, Colorado during Labor Day weekend (the first Monday in September). The 49th edition took place on September 2–6, 2022. History First held on 30 August 1974, the festival, held in the Sheridan Opera House, was started by the Telluride Council for the Arts and Humanities, Bill and Stella Pence, Tom Luddy, and James Card of Eastman-Kodak Film Preserve and Scott Brown. It is operated by the National Film Preserve. In 2010, TFF partnered with UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. This partnership created FilmLab which was a program that focuses on the art and industry of filmmaking. This program is custom-designed for ten selected filmmaker graduates from UCLA. The partnership was further extended in 2012, the two partners created a mutually curated film program on UCLA's Westwood campus. In 2013 the festival celebrated its 40th Anniversary with the addition of a new venue, the Werner Herzog Theatre and an extra day of programming. The festival went on hiatus in 2020 due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and resumed a year later in 2021. Program The bulk of the program is made up of new films, and there is an informal tradition that new films must be shown for the first time in North America to be eligible for the festival. Telluride situated on the international film festival calendar after the Cannes Film Festival, but just before the Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival. This insistence on premieres has led to Telluride's being associated with the discovery of a number of important new films and filmmakers like Michael Moore (whose first film Roger and Me showed there for the first time in 1989) and Robert Rodriguez (whose first feature El Mariachi got its first festival screening there in 1992). The festival has also had the American premiere of films such as My Dinner With Andre (Louis Malle, 1981), Stranger than Paradise (Jim Jarmusch, 1984), Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986), The Civil War (Ken Burns, 1990), The Crying Game (Neil Jordan, 1992), Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001), Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005), The Imitation Game (Morten Tyldum, 2014), Sully (Clint Eastwood, 2016), Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016), and Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig, 2017). Since 1995 a special medallion has also been presented annually, usually to a non-filmmaker who has had a major impact