Breaking Baz At Telluride: Following In Barry Jenkins’ Footsteps, Life-Changing Opportunities For 50 Students In Annual Symposium
deadline.comAustin Sipes, student symposium coordinator for the Telluride Film Festival, checked in this year’s class that had traveled far and wide to participate in what he termed as a “life-changing” immersion into the intricacies of filmmaking.
In 2000, as an undergraduate at the University of Vermont, Sipes hitched up in Telluride as one of the few chosen to engage in the student symposium, now in its 33rd year.
Okay, how life-changing was it? “A thousand million percent life-changing,” came the sparky response. “I tell the students every year that it’s a life-changing experience,” Sipes told me. “And invariably they come to me afterwards with cries of, ‘You are not kidding!’” Sipes now works in reality television.
He’s currently associate director of Top Chef, and left the shoot for a few days to run the Telluride symposium. Over the years, I’ve observed scores of students, sporting their distinctive orange lanyards, trooping into screenings at the town’s Werner Herzog Theatre, or the Palm, or the Galaxy in the opposite direction.
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