I left Telluride at 3:30 AM with a driving service which takes people to the airport. The van picked up two Hispanic men who I had seen around town, and the younger one sat next to me. He had a filmmaker’s bag—a gift given to filmmakers, which we in the humble shipping office stuff with small gifts—so I asked, "a filmmaker?" and he made motions to signify that he did not understand. He spoke a Spanish that I did not understand.

After a while I began to think that he was Viva in the film of that name, here crowding me in the van. The man in back, who had a rather serious sounding cough, might have been Mamá, the wise transvestite who offers to fight the ex-boxer father and take in Viva. But, of course they were actors, people sitting next to me in a van, but they looked, especially the older man, as if they had just walked out of the film. It was a wonderful confusion of reality and fiction. It was too early or too late to say anything to them about how much I liked the film.
 
What was extraordinary about Viva was that it is a movie with some beautiful transvestite and transexual characters but its not about their sexualities. It is about the loneliness of one young gay man and the improbable love he developed for his washed-up and hyper-masculine—he's an ex-boxer who killed a man—father who turns up all of a sudden while Viva is preforming, getting tips in his bodice, in a transvestite bar and lays him out. The monstrous, but pitiful old man, tries to take over the young man’s life in a shabby Havana flat. Viva gives up his burgeoning career as a magnificent torch singer and hairdresser to another older man who preforms at, and possibly owns, the club. Viva's transformation from a lithe graceful and sorrowful boy into a torrid woman brandishing a shawl captures something of the thrill which answers the question of why a person would want to perform another gender. I have never seen this done as well on film before. Although the reason he stops singing at the club is never completely clear, Viva returns to prostitution to feed himself and his father. In the scenes of Viva soliciting, the filmmaker captures a beauty and a sense of vulnerability as he sits in lush corner of a Havana park that I have not seen since Vivre Sa Vie. Finally, we learn that the father left to give Viva's mother "some hope," that he did kill a man, and that he was let out of jail because he has advanced cancer. If it sounds a little contrived, it doesn't play that way because the characters are magnificent, the worn-down father plays his part with some of the brilliance of Niels Arestrup in a similar role in Audiard's The Beat My Heart Skipped and the camera loves the young man. I particularly liked the old Queen Mamà, who had a wonderful face and offered to take on the old boxer. After the father's confessions, he and the boy share a walk around the city—share ice cream—and it's a particularly poignant scene because they hardly have enough money to eat—and then in the next scene the father has an attack of pneumonia. Before that the son has to drag him to the bed when he is poisoned by some bad rum, and there is a moment where the father grasps his hand. I had to leave the film when the father was in the hospital, when the son was sitting there all alone, and the nurse tells him that the dying man is lucky because he has a good son. I sat all alone with my dying father, a difficult man—although in an everyday way compared with these characters—because I was overwhelmed with grief. I actually take this as a tribute to the Irish filmmaker, Paddy Breathnach and writer Mark O'Halloran, who made this marvelous, beautifully humane, Spanish-language film. I have not seen any reviews or press about this film which makes me think: here is a beautifully-made, graceful film, which no one might see, about real people in the real world.
 
When we got back to our lodgings here was Ingrid Bergman in Europe ’51 on Turner Classic Movies. I watched as much as I could, the factory scenes were incomparable, although the melodrama was lost on me since I could not follow the entire narrative. But Ingrid Bergman, in the time-stopping, soft-focus close-ups of her second collaboration with Rossellini was so radiant, and in comparison with the worked-over starlets of our media sphere, a force of nature or an act of god, which ever you prefer. Hilary, who took me mushroom hunting, commented that people used to be more beautiful, because their bodies were less polluted by the chemicals we are forced to consume in our food and in the environemnt at large. An interesting idea.
 
Wednesday: 4:55 AM crossed a river, the Missouri perhaps and the horned moon which had been hanging above a very bright planet disappeared.  Was it into a murky sky or did the train change direction? My favorite line in the documentary He Named Me Malala by Davis Guggenheim, who won an Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth, was from the sad and displaced mother who said that everything in England was completely different than Pakistan except for the moon, which was the same. In the conversation between Ken Burns and Guggenheim, after the film, Burns compared Malala to King and Mandela. We missed the special screening for the Festival Patrons where Malala appeared via a satellite connection—her father was present in Telluride for the event.

The full moon at the end of August was brilliant in Telluride, flooding the sky with a silvery light we never see in the Megapolis.