Ouray International Film Festival Returns Summer 2024

With towering cliff faces, majestic waterfalls, ice climbers and Swiss-like chalets, Ouray is truly cinematic in scope.

“It's the perfect village for a global festival,” says Ouray International Film Festival (OIFF) co-founder Jared LaCroix. “The town is spectacularly beautiful,” and so lends itself well to a uniquely worldly event like OIFF.

This year's 5th annual festival runs Thursday, June 20 through Sunday, June 23, 2024. It takes full advantage of the locale, screening in both the historic Wright Opera House and also under the stars in Fellin Park. These diverse contexts lend weight to the truly international festival, which prides itself on its inclusiveness and worldliness.

The four-day event is meticulously curated, with a wide range of voices, emotions and genres. “Our team is a group of artists who love to champion the work of other artists,” adds LaCroix, and this loving support of the craft carries the festival throughout its extended weekend.

Much of the festival is dedicated to a series of short films. A medium often “unavailable on streaming platforms and in theaters,” short films are one of the unique ways the festival condenses a plethora of choice and voice into their time slots. “Short films are like short stories: they can pack a lot of life and humanity into such a short span of time,” says LaCroix.

Take the morning block on Friday, June 21, for example, which spans an hour and a half (or the span of a typical full-length film): Waltert and Schoeck’s ethereal Swiss animation Greylands, where the lush and wild, human and stark blend together in a lucid vision of the hunt, rubs shoulders with Nathan Xia’s deeply human Adam’s Song, a meditation on the gravity of self-destruction, creativity and their interpenetration. The novel and oh-so human vantage of a trans-police officer in Angalis Field’s Bust, or the young African migrant in Egypt in Morad Mostafa’s I Promise You Paradise, give way to an experimental retelling of the Navajo creation epic in Diné filmmaker Colten Ashley’s Nihalgai.

The festival’s collaborative nature is downright familial. As such, there is continuity year to year, with filmmakers making vibrant returns to OIFF in 2024. With support from the Telluride Foundation, the OIFF will also have a series that highlights Ukrainian filmmakers, led by OIFF alumnus Maria Pankova, and OIFF sweetheart Ethan Payne will be returning with the debut of his full length feature The Green Flash, following a lauded short at the inaugural OIFF in 2020.

The scope is vast, dizzying and transformative. “You will see comedies that will make you laugh until you cry, documentaries that will broaden your sense of the world and narrative fiction pieces that challenge us to understand ourselves and each other in richer ways,” offers LaCroix. Panels and discussions abound, with expert commentary by scholar in residence (and renowned filmmaker) James Choi as well as various filmmakers and special guests.

Photos courtesy of Jared LaCroix + Ouray International Film Festival

It's ambitious, intellectual and heady, and yet there is also room for movement. A dynamic not often associated with film, dance and music take the center stage in 2024. This year, OIFF will be staging its first live musical experience when San Francisco-based filmmaker HP Mendoza joins the festival to perform live music to accompany his visual album Attack, Decay, Release.

It is a raucous celebration of music and art. A multimedia spectacle that begs participation and “a brilliant piece that requires a big area of the opera house to be reserve for the audience to dance.” It challenges notions of how an audience engages with cinema.

This defiance of expectation is what has made OIFF such a success over its short span. First-time filmmakers find ardent supporters, while veterans reconnect with the wider global cinema community. Film audiences expect a torrent of emotion, but not beneath the stars at 8,000 feet. They expect moving scores, but not to be expected to move. With “balance, diversity and passion,” OIFF is helping bridge the gap between what film is and what film can be.

Learn more and get tickets at ourayfilmfestival.com.

This spotlight is a sponsored partnership.