The films partly reflect the business realities of Hollywood, which is still grappling with the aftereffects of the writers’ and actors’ strikes last year.
As luck would have it, the documentary filmmaker Matt Tyrnauer was recording a conversation with James Carville, the longtime political analyst and subject of Mr. Tyrnauer’s new movie, in May 2023 when a national poll revealed that likely voters favored former President Donald J. Trump over President Biden by seven percentage points.
“It knocked me right off my horse,” Mr. Carville said in the film. That moment set in motion his contentious 18-month campaign to encourage Mr. Biden to drop out of the race.
“I was old. I knew a little bit about what the job entailed, and I had a platform,” Mr. Carville, 79, said in a recent interview. “I felt like I didn’t have another choice.”
Mr. Tyrnauer didn’t have much of a choice, either: He needed to change his film, initially about Mr. Carville’s 30-year career as a very public political consultant, into a more immediate chronicle of Mr. Carville’s effort to alter the course of the presidential election and Mr. Biden’s decision to drop out of the race.
On Friday, the final result — “Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid!” — will debut at the Telluride Film Festival. It is one of 15 documentary films, many about current events, at the Labor Day weekend festival, a four-day confab in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado that caters to Hollywood’s cognoscenti and is often a harbinger for the fall awards season.
Others include “Zurawski v Texas,” from the directors Maisie Crow and Abbie Perrault, which tracks the efforts of Molly Duane, a lawyer with the Center for Reproductive Rights, to fight a Texas law that limits health care options for pregnant women. (The lead plaintiff in the case, Amanda Zurawski, and her husband, Josh, appeared onstage at the Democratic National Convention last week to share their story.) “Separated,” from the famed director Errol Morris (“The Fog of War”), examines the U.S. border family-separation policy enacted by the Trump administration. “No Other Land,” a joint project by a Palestinian activist and an Israeli journalist, details daily life for a West Bank village under Israeli occupation.
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Source: Elections - nytimes.com
