Between Venice, Toronto, AFI and Telluride, everyone’s got festival fever!

Well, I thought it was festival fever, as it turns out it was just a herpes flare-up but still, there’s no denying that the tell-tale runny cold sores of the late summer film festival season are popping up all over the genitalia of sexually active cinephiles and industry shills alike. Venice kicked off with a paramecium-infested BANG earlier today, and the Telluride Film Festival just unveiled the super-top-secret line-up for their 34th Annual Festival (August 31st – September 3rd), held up in yonder Colorado mountains.

The unprofitable yet critic-friendly films of this years fest, conveniently cut n’ pasted from today’s Variety, are below:

• “I’m Not There,” Todd Haynes’s multi-layered ode to Bob Dylan featuring Cate Blanchett, Christian Bale, Richard Gere, Ben Wishaw, Marcus Carl Franklin, Heath Ledger, Julianne Moore, Michelle Williams and Charlotte Gainsbourg. The Weinstein Company will release this slowly, beginning in New York.
• Julian Schnabel’s “The Diving Bell And The Butterfly”, an adaptation of ELLE France’s editor, Jean-Dominique Bauby’s best-selling memoir. Miramax will release. Schnabel won the best director prize at Cannes.
• “Into the Wild,” Sean Penn’s adaptation of Jon Krakauer’s nonfiction tale of Chris McCandless (Emile Hirsch) who gave up all he owned and hitchhiked to Alaska. Paramount Vantage will release.
• “Margot at the Wedding,” from “The Squid and the Whale” director Noah Baumbach, tells the story of Margot (Nicole Kidman), who work to foil the wedding of her sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Paramount Vantage will distribute.
• Alison Eastwood’s debut “Rails And Ties” staring Kevin Bacon and Marcia Gay Harden in a story about the bond between two families after a tragic train wreck. Warner Independent is distributing.
• Variety chief film critic Todd McCarthy’s “Pierre Rissient: Man Of Cinema” about the infamous film promoter and talent scout.
• Lee Chang-dong’s “Secret Sunshine” about a young woman adjusting to life after a tragedy.
• “Who Is Norman Lloyd?” Matthew Sussman’s doc on the veteran entertainer.
• Cannes’ Palme d’Or winner “4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days,” writer-director Cristian Mungiu’s story about Communism’s absurd “golden years” in Bucharest, to be released by IFC.
• Eran Kolirin’s “The Band’s Visit” is about a lost Egyptian police force band. SPC will distribute.
• “A Thousand Years Of Good Prayers,” Wayne Wang’s adaptation of stories by Yiyun Li, where a Chinese man travels to America and falls in love with an Iranian woman.
• Stefan Ruzowitzky’s “The Counterfeiters” is the true story of the largest counterfeiting scheme in history initiated by the Nazis, to be released by SPC.
• “Persepolis,” Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Parronaud’s animated adaptation of a graphic novel about a girl’s coming-of-age in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. The SPC film is voiced by Catherine Deneuve, Sean Penn, Gena Rowlands and Iggy Pop.
• “When Did You Last See Your Father?” David Nicholl’s adaptation of poet-novelist Blake Morrison’s memoir regarding his complicated relationship with his father. This SPC film is directed by Anand Tucker (”Shopgirl”) and stars Colin Firth and Jim Broadbent.
• Barbet Schroeder’s docu “Terror’s Advocate,” profiling the controversial French lawyer Jacques Vergès who defended Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie and Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy.
• Baltasar Kormákur “Jar City,” is a thriller set in contemporary Iceland starring Ingvar Sigurdsson.
• Cannes’ Camera d’Or winner “Jellyfish,” co-directed by Israeli novelist Etgar Keret and screenwriter Shira Geffen, follows the lives of three Tel Aviv women.
• Li Yang’s “Blind Mountain,” about a woman lured to a remote Chinese farming village and sold into slavery.
• “Brick Lane,” Sarah Gavron’s adaptation of the Booker Prize-winning novel, follows a woman’s impoverished life from Bangladesh to post-9/11 London. SPC will distribute.
• Kevin Macdonald’s docu “My Enemy’s Enemy,” tracking Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, a.k.a. the Butcher of Lyon, to be released by The Weinstein Company.
• Aleksei Balabanov’s “Cargo 200″ offers a detailed portrait of the last days of the Soviet Union.
• Werner Herzog looks for purpose in Antarctica in his new docu “Encounters at the End of the World.”
• A man with broken wings falls from the sky in Khuat Akhmetov’s “Wind Man.”
• In docu “Journey With Peter Sellars,” Mark Kidel travels with the director as he speaks about his life and work.
• Mark Obenhaus’ docu “Steep!” illustrates the history of extreme skiing. SPC will release.

For more info visit the Telluride wolrd internet site at:

http://www.telluridefilmfestival.com

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