Oliver Stone, Ernest Hemingway’s Grave and You: Paste at the 2016 Sun Valley Film Festival

Set in the bucolic mountain town of Ketchum, Idaho, the Sun Valley Film Festival (now in its fifth year) is nothing like the chaotic and bustling scenes in Cannes or Sundance, more like a loose and friendly group of filmmakers, film fans and even celebs, moving around Ketchum from theater to lounge to theater to dinner to after-party. The casual film goer, the aspiring filmmaker, or even the hardcore film geek who otherwise doesn’t have an entrée into this world—these are the people to whom SVFF caters, and while there are those of us who head up year after year, the festival is equally welcoming and accessible to the newcomer as it is the returning veteran, to the networking industry person as it is to the devoted buff with no business connections. In other words, you’re as likely to bump into Oliver Stone, Bruce Dern, Mark Duplass, Joshua Leonard or Kevin Smith as you are to…well, me.

With a casual air, general lack of pretense and absence of velvet ropes, the SVFF tries not to overload attendees with decisions. Even the gregarious Executive Director Teddy Grennan and charming Festival Director Candice Pate are always ready to point you in the right direction, be that to a film, a reception or to local eatery Grumpy’s for a cheeseburger and giant beer. Their program is small and manageable: One lounge functions as festival HQ, a performance space for musicians and a setting for bourbon tastings, and there is generally only one reception or party at any given time. As a result, the festival tends to take on the air of a moveable feast, with attendees peeling off to see a film, only to rejoin the group later on for a meal, post-screening drink or a concert at local watering hole Whiskey Jacques.

Sticking with the “keep it simple” theme, Laura Mehlhaff assembled a compact, but expertly curated selection, mixing upcoming releases with a few retrospective offerings and a solid selection of smaller US and international films: 19 narrative features, 12 feature-length docs and a collection of shorts, including a collection of films courtesy of the festival’s partnership with Nat Geo WILD. While it’s often difficult for smaller festivals to land quality world premieres, this year’s SVFF managed to corral seven features (two narratives and five docs) and six short films that fit that bill, as well as two features that Sun Valley audiences were the first in the nation to see: Matthew Brown’s The Man Who Knew Infinity with Jeremy Irons, Dev Patel and Stephen Fry, and Bob Nelson’s The Confirmation, starring the impressive cadre of Clive Owen, Matthew Modine, Patton Oswalt, Robert Forster, Stephen Tobolowsky, Tim Blake Nelson and Maria Bello.

Among the indie offerings were the films that vied for the festival’s One in a Million award, which goes to one documentary and one narrative feature length film, each made for under $1,000,000 (and, full disclosure, it was this writer’s honor to be asked to serve on the narrative jury this year). Then it should be a given that the narrative winner comes fully recommended: Celia Rowlson-Hall’s MA, a bold and experimental look at the Virgin Mary’s story, this time set in the American Southwest. Visually stunning, MA is a riveting and wholly original production, completely devoid of dialogue, told in movement and incidental sound alone. The documentary winner was Holly Morris and Anne Bogart’s much-praised Babushkas of Chernobyl, currently making its way through the festival circuit.