Politics and Hollywood collide at the 2024 Telluride Film Festival

After crippling Hollywood strikes dimmed the star power at last year’s Telluride Film Festival, celebrities were back in force again. On a somewhat lighter note, famed Democratic strategist Carville brought his inimitable eccentric Cajun wit and shrewd political analysis to the festival as the subject of Matthew Tyrnauer’s doc “Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid.” During a post-screening Q&A Sunday evening, Tyrnauer explained that he had finished the film, which has been picked up by CNN Films, just before the debate between Trump and Biden, only to have to re-edit it as the campaign quickly took a head-spinning swerve. Among other politically charged docs, Brazilian director Petra Costa followed up her Oscar-nominated “The Edge of Democracy” with “Apocalypse in the Tropics,” about the rise of Jair Bolsonaro, while Errol Morris tackled the Trump administration’s controversial family-separation border policy with his new film, “Separated.” “Our information revolution is causing a lot of fanaticism, and it’s urgent to create mechanisms that will stop this tribalism from intensifying to the extent that we kill each other and kill the planet,” Costa said in a post-screening Q&A. “I believe that we are at the time of such intense crisis that that will be possible.” But the film with the most intense political heat at Telluride was one that had been kept under tight wraps until the festival had already begun: the controversial Trump biopic “The Apprentice.” Introducing the film to a packed crowd Saturday night alongside stars Sebastian Stan, who plays Trump, and Jeremy Strong, who plays his ruthless mentor Roy Cohn, director Ali Abbasi said that, contrary to the Trump camp’s fierce pushback following its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, the darkly comic movie was not intended as a takedown of Trump. Special counsel Smith took a brief break from his ongoing prosecutions of Trump to support his wife, documentarian Katy Chevigny, whose first narrative feature, “The Easy Kind,” about a Nashville singer-songwriter, screened as part of the festival’s Backlot program.