We are proud to announce our 2018 Guest Director, Jonathan Lethem. The award-winning novelist, essayist and short story writer is set to select a series of films to present at the 45th Telluride Film Festival running over Labor Day Weekend, August 31 - September 3, 2018.

The Guest Director serves as a key collaborator in the Festival’s programming decisions, bringing new ideas and overlooked films to Telluride. In keeping with Telluride Film Festival tradition, Lethem’s film selections, along with the rest of the Telluride lineup, will be kept secret until Opening Day.

“Tom and I first met Jonathan through Criterion Collection,” said TFF executive director Julie Huntsinger. “Since then, we have forever been impressed with his knowledge of and enthusiasm for cinema. We are thrilled to have him join us for the 2018 Festival!”

One of America’s greatest contemporary writers, Jonathan Lethem was born in 1964 in Brooklyn, NYC to artist Richard Lethem and late political activist Judith Lethem. His impressive body of work spans 10 novels, five short story collections, a novella, two books of essays, a comic series and writings in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone and McSweeny’s. Lethem’s first genre-defying novel, Gun with Occasional Music (1994) experimented with science fiction and crime and gained him a strong cult following. In 1999, Lethem’s fifth novel Motherless Brooklyn met with significant commercial and critical success winning the National Book Critics Circle Award, Macallan Gold Dagger for Crime Fiction, Salon Book Award and was named Esquire’s book of the year. The film adaptation of Motherless Brooklyn, directed by Edward Norton and starring Bruce Willis, Alec Baldwin, Willem Dafoe and Leslie Mann is currently in production and slated for a 2019 release. Lethem’s more recent novels include New York Times Bestseller The Fortress of Solitude (2003), You Don’t Love Me Yet (2007), Chronic City (2009), Dissident Gardens (2013) and A Gambler’s Anatomy (2016). In 2005, Jonathan Lethem was the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship.

“From the very beginning for me, my love for literature and my love for film were splendidly mixed-up and inextricable,” said Lethem. “I always saw the two great 20th Century storytelling forms as speaking to and through one another. So, when by my great good luck I fell in with Tom Luddy and Julie Huntsinger, I immediately recognized them as being of my tribe; they feel the same resonance and have designed their wonderful festival in the mountains to reflect it. When I learned they’d involved writers I admire like Michael Ondaatje and Rachel Kushner and Geoff Dyer in the heart of the program, I was thrilled – and envious! I’m still pinching myself in disbelief that it’s my turn to play at programming the Dream Multiplex.”

Past Guest Directors include Joshua Oppenheimer, Volker Schlöndorff, Rachel Kushner, Guy Maddin, Caetano Veloso, Michael Ondaatje, Alexander Payne, Salman Rushdie, Peter Bogdanovich, B. Ruby Rich, Phillip Lopate, Errol Morris, Bertrand Tavernier, John Boorman, John Simon, Buck Henry, Laurie Anderson, Stephen Sondheim, G. Cabrera Infante, Peter Sellars, Don DeLillo, J.P. Gorin, Edith Kramer and Slavoj Žižek.

The Guest Director program is sponsored by FilmStruck, Turner’s subscription on-demand service that offers film aficionados a comprehensive and constantly refreshed library of films including an eclectic mix of contemporary arthouse, indie, foreign, cult and classic Hollywood films. FilmStruck is the exclusive streaming home to the Warner Bros. classic film library and the Criterion Collection. FilmStruck was developed by Turner Classic Movies (TCM) and is managed by TCM in partnership with Warner Bros. and the Criterion Collection.