This article is featured in the 2024 Freshman special issue.
Each Labor Day weekend since 1974, the Telluride Film Festival has attracted thousands of film lovers, movie directors and actors to the small mountain town of Telluride, Colo. Considered one of the leading arts events in the country, the festival is known for offering an exclusive preview of emerging talent and premiering films that often become Oscar nominees. Past Telluride films to receive Oscar nominations have included “Slumdog Millionaire,” “12 Years a Slave” and, most recently, “The Holdovers” and “Poor Things.”
A few weeks after the festival, some of the films make their way to another small town — Hanover. This year, the Hopkins Center will put on seven films, an increase from the six films typically shown in previous years. For almost 40 years, the Hopkins Center for the Arts has offered exclusive screenings for students, faculty and community members through “Telluride at Dartmouth.”
The Hop’s film program manager Johanna Evans ’10, who is also a member of the print traffic team at Telluride, said Telluride at Dartmouth is an “afterfest of Telluride.” However, afterfests — which typically allow locals to enjoy the films at a reduced cost after the out-of-towners leave — usually don’t happen on the other side of the country. We have former Hop film director Bill Pence to thank for the Telluride at Dartmouth exception.
Pence co-founded the Telluride Film Festival with his wife Stella Pence in 1974, shortly after moving to Colorado and transforming an old opera house into a movie theater for the festival. By the time Pence moved to Hanover and began working at Dartmouth in 1983, the festival had become a roaring success — transforming Telluride from a small Coloradan town to a hotspot for arts and culture. The then-director of the Dartmouth film program continued to run the festival from a small office near the Hanover Inn, and then later above Nugget Theaters, according to film historian and Telluride curator Chris Robinson ’86.
“It’s crazy Bill had time to do anything,” Robinson said. “Besides running the program at the Hopkins Center and the Telluride Film Festival … for many years, he also programmed the Nugget Theater.”
According to the Nugget website, Bill and Stella Pence were hired as consultants to book agents and manage the theater in April 1984. Coincidentally, the Nugget Theaters in Hanover tout the same name as the local movie theater in Telluride.
In 1987 — after 13 years of Telluride and four years at Dartmouth — the Pences decided to bring festival films to Hanover, and so Telluride at Dartmouth was born. In 2015, Bill Pence told The Dartmouth that he wanted to express his gratitude to the College by forging a relationship with the festival. Every year until Bill Pence’s retirement from Dartmouth in 2016, the couple handpicked six films for the Hop to screen.
As Pence’s love for film lives on at Dartmouth, Telluride at Dartmouth also continues. Since Pence’s retirement in 2016, Telluride staff members have taken on the role of handpicking films that they think would be of interest to Dartmouth students. Last year, the staff chose films including “The Holdovers” and “Poor Things.”
“[The festival staff] have a pretty good sensibility of what would be of interest to students on campus,” Evans said. “They sort of share with us if there are multiple options which films we would prefer, but … they are taking on the lion’s share of the curation of this program.”
But the relationship between Dartmouth and Telluride extends far beyond the Pences — and even the festival films that come to the College each year. When Bill Pence began working at the College, he brought with him an opportunity for a Dartmouth student — usually the director of the Dartmouth Film Society — to intern with Telluride, according to Robinson. According to Evans and Robinson — who were both former directors of the Film Society — the intern would help curate the short film programming at Telluride, which would involve screening thousands of films and sending Bill Pence the movies worth his consideration.
“[The student intern] would then go work at the Telluride Film Festival,” Robinson said. “Every year, you would have a new Dartmouth intern … [who] would continue to work for the film festival after they would graduate.”
Since attending the festival 40 years ago as an intern, Robinson said he has returned every year and now works as a curator for the festival.
The Dartmouth student internship program has created a longstanding relationship with the festival that has outlived Bill Pence and his career, Evans said. Although Pence retired from the festival in 2006, from Dartmouth in 2016 and died in 2022, 20 to 30 Dartmouth alumni still make their way back to the Telluride festival in various capacities each year — as volunteers, staff and attendees, according to Evans.
“Generations of Dartmouth students have worked or continue to work at Telluride,” Robinson added. “[W]e try to get together at least once a year to see how we are all doing.”
The special bond between Dartmouth students and the festival has also continued in other ways, Evans said. The Telluride Student Symposium — which allows 50 undergraduates and graduate students to participate in five days of screenings and seminars during the festival — tends to include at least one Dartmouth student, according to film and media studies professor Jefferey Ruoff. Ruoff, who is the author of the book “Telluride in the Film Festival Galaxy,” said the student symposium is “the best way to attend the festival” because it allows selected students to attend private dinners and conversations with filmmakers. The students receive student festival passes as part of their acceptance into the symposium.
This year, Malik Terrab ’25 and C.J. Henrich ’24 — both current or former Hop employees, respectively — will be attending Telluride as student symposium members, they said.
Henrich, who was involved in the Dartmouth Film Society as a student, said the society has encouraged members to attend the symposium because of the club’s “long-standing connection” with the film festival and Telluride at Dartmouth.
Bill Pence’s legacy also lives on in the way films are presented at the Hop. According to Evans, film screenings are presented with a sense of showmanship inspired by Bill Pence.
“A lot of the way we present films at the Hop is based on Bill’s sense of what makes a good show, like opening the curtain and having the first image splash on the screen right as the curtain is fully open,” Evans said.
As another way to bring a good show to Dartmouth and inspire the next generation of film enthusiasts, Bill Pence also took over the Dartmouth Film Awards in 1983, during which high profile actors and producers visit Dartmouth to receive awards, according to Evans. Visitors — whose presence further connected Dartmouth to the upper echelon of the film world — have included Werner Herzog, Robert Redford and Meryl Streep, according to the Valley News.
“When they came [to Dartmouth], they got a tremendous amount of attention and kudos, and he made sure they had a good time,” Ruoff explained.
Bill Pence’s legacy in fostering connection among film lovers is clearly seen during Telluride at Dartmouth. Although Terrab will be attending the symposium, he looks forward to watching the films again at the College.
“I am really excited to get to connect with other students,” he said. “I’m assuming most of them are filmmakers or film lovers, and I think that’ll be nice to branch out my film community.”
Evans also emphasized his enthusiasm for enjoying the films with his community.
“There is definitely excitement about bringing the films back to my own community, to my friends and colleagues and the movie lovers I see in the Hop every week.”
Owen Doyle ’27 — a Telluride native who grew up attending the festival because his mom worked there — said he was able to watch the films with friends on campus last year. He noted that he would have otherwise missed the festival entirely due to first-year orientation.
“It was a little slice of home,” he said.
In bringing a piece of Telluride to Dartmouth, Bill Pence sought to provide programming that had something everyone could enjoy, according to Evans.
“Bill was a really strong believer in programming something for everybody,” Evans said. “For him, it really was all about the show.”
From Telluride to Hanover, the show continues with Dartmouth — not only through the Hop every September, but also in every student symposium member or Dartmouth alumnus attending Telluride.
Telluride at Dartmouth will run Sept. 20 through Sept. 26, and all screenings will take place in Loew Auditorium in the Black Family Visual Arts Center.
