Nearly every year for the past half century, Hollywood mega-stars, studio moguls, and normal people who love films have spent their Labor Day weekends crowding inside a resurrected opera house in a former Colorado mining town for a celebration of cinema unlike any other on the festival circuit. Since its inception, in 1974, the Telluride Film Festival has grown into one of the industry’s most coveted and acclaimed. Today, it’s under the sole directorship of Julie Huntsinger, who met co-founder Tom Luddy in the early 1990s while working as an assistant at Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios. With her leadership, 11 of the last 17 films to win best picture at the Academy Awards have premiered at Telluride. The festival doesn’t feel corporate—even though it now has a luxury car sponsor. The Show is still infused with the late founders’s enthusiasm for the obscure corners of film history, and for their insatiable desire to throw a party better than the previous year’s. While they won’t be present, their spirit lives on. —William Zimmerman