Despite being a 46-year-old event, Telluride Mountainfilm and its curation continue to deepen and evolve. Jaw-dropping sports footage on bikes and skis is always exciting to watch, and those professional athletes deserve accolades. But enriching, complex human stories exist beyond that high performance on dirt, rock, and snow.
This year, the festival’s first-ever climate-inspired drag show and disco party, hosted by environmentalist drag queen Pattie Gonia, was a hit. The event was free, open to the public, and inspired a new degree of recyclable outfit creation. Mountaineer Conrad Anker even ended up wigged and on stage at the 11th hour. (He’s as limber as he is strong! You heard it here.)
On screen, this year’s selection of adventure and environmental films ranged from Indigenous storytelling to transgender voices, wolf management, the impact of social media hate on subsistence hunting, and more. The festival also debuted its inaugural Indigenous Storytellers shorts program, which included worldwide pieces. Those narratives make up mountain and outdoor communities around the globe, and many of those pivotal stories are found in this film lineup.
Top Documentaries of 2024
While narrowing down a list of five films from the impressive collection at Telluride Mountainfilm is a grinding task, here are a handful of eye-opening picks that stand out from the 2024 lineup.
To catch these films in person, keep your ears open for the announcement of Mountainfilm on Tour — a traveling lineup of handpicked films from this year’s festival — which will be released in August.
Sugarcane
- Based: British Columbia, Canada
- Year: 2024
- Duration: 107 min.
- Where to watch: National Geographic Documentary Films will release Sugarcane in theaters: in New York and Toronto on August 9, and a wider release throughout the U.S. and Canada on August 16. The documentary will be streamable on Disney+ and Hulu in late 2024.
Though I missed the closing 2024 Festival Awards Ceremony, I was not surprised to see that Sugarcane won Best Documentary Feature.
Overwhelming to comprehend, Sugarcane reveals a present-day investigation of the unmarked graves at an Indian residential school near Sugarcane Reserve in Canada, a story that broke in 2021. In real time, evidence and interviews reveal missing children, sexual and physical abuse, hundreds of annual illegitimate and propagandized newborns, and infanticide within the St. Joseph Catholic Church, which operated the school. The investigation is ongoing.
Investigative journalist and director Emily Kassie relocated to British Columbia to intimately capture the unfolding process alongside director Julian Brave NoiseCat, whose dad was born at the school by his grandmother. The film shares the earliest moments of reconciliation — between generations of family members, the tribe, the church, and federal agencies — and data from the open case.
“While 139 Indian residential schools existed in Canada, 408 Indian residential schools were federally funded in the U.S. until 1969,” shared Kassie in a post-film audience presentation at Mountainfilm, adding, “The last Canadian school closed in 1997.” This is the first investigation of its kind in North America.
We Ride for Her
Today, murder is the third leading cause of death for Indigenous women, a harrowing reality and statistic. They also experience murder rates up to 10 times the national average, and 40% of victims of sex trafficking are Native.
We Ride for Her shares the story of the Medicine Wheel Riders, a group of Indigenous women motorcyclists who raise awareness about the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives (MMIW) crisis. Every year, they ride to the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota to represent the movement and educate the public.
Director Katrina Lillian Sorrentino spoke at the Mountainfilm screening about the decolonization of this project’s filmmaking. Their process included schedule rest, a non-hierarchical structure, and emotional support for participants. The film is also community-owned to support equitable partnership and ownership across the producers and financiers.
In the Dirt
- Based: Navajo Nation
- Year: 2024
- Duration: 41 min.
- Where to watch: At inthedirtfilm.com and public screenings across the United States. The next one on deck: Rocky’s Market in Oakland, Calif.
This documentary captures today’s grassroots evolution of mountain biking across the Navajo Nation — which has limited access and no bike shops. Through a Native-led effort, mountain bike programs have been integrated into school programming, race events and teams have launched, trails are being built, and bikes are being repaired for use.
As a result, hundreds of youth are mountain biking on new singletrack and in the desert backcountry. According to the film, the sport has become a space of expression, outlet for athleticism and park-style tricks, and an open space for youth to process hardship, as well as the fastest-growing recreational sport on Navajo Nation.
An initial catalyst of the Native-led, grassroots movement is the Silver Stallion Bicycle & Coffee Works, started by former pro cyclist Scott Nydam in Gallup, N.M. The nonprofit helps teach Navajo youth how to mountain bike through after-school programs, as well as bike mechanics, and provides a mobile bike repair service. The group also started a namesake race team, which has dovetailed with the debut of The New Mexico Interscholastic Cycling League (NMCL), which is in its second year of races.
Between the Mountain and the Sky
- Based: U.S. and Nepal
- Year: 2024
- Duration: 92 min.
- Where to watch: Not yet announced — check back!
Following its world premiere at Telluride Mountainfilm, Between the Mountain and the Sky finished the festival with Audience Choice Award and Student Choice Award. Every viewer stood during the applause.
Hopeful and heartbreaking, this documentary — nearly a decade in the making — follows philanthropist and humanitarian Maggie Doyne, the 2015 CNN Hero of the Year, on her journey as the guardian of more than 50 orphaned Nepalese children. After graduating from high school, she started the Kopila Valley Children’s Home alongside managing director Tope Malla, a Nepalese orphan — and never left.
Since then, she’s also helped launch the Kopila Valley School for children, a women’s empowerment center, and other community programs operated within The BlinkNow Foundation, which she co-founded. The film also shares Doyne’s unfolding love story with director Jeremy Power Regimbal.
Homecoming
- Based: U.S.
- Year: 2023
- Duration: 18 min.
- Where to watch: The film is embedded below!
Can you imagine nearly 30 million buffalo roaming the Great Plains? In 1800, they did. By the end of the century, only a few hundred lived.
After being gone for close to 100 years, this film captures today’s tribal buffalo restoration and reintroduction to their home landscapes.
For instance, the film captures a donation from the city of Denver, which has donated 85 bison from two conservation herds — which are descendants of the last remaining wild bison in North America — to Native American tribes since 2018.
On the receiving end, the InterTribal Buffalo Council (ITBC) is one existing collective of 83 tribes across 22 states that helps to manage more than 25,000 buffalo, which have been sent to 65 herds nationwide. Another effort, the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative, works to buy back land and introduce youth to the health of living with buffalo.
In March 2023, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland announced a $25 million commitment from the Inflation Reduction Act to help restore buffalo to ancestral lands.
