The Taos Talking Pictures Film Festival ran from 1994 to 2003 with a peak budget of $750,000 in 2002 and attracted Hollywood stars like Elizabeth Taylor

Elizabeth Taylor

Dame Elizabeth Rosemond "Liz" Taylor, DBE was a British-American actress. From her early years as a child star with MGM, she became one of the great screen actresses of Hollywood's Golden Age...

, James Coburn

James Coburn

James Harrison Coburn III was an American film and television actor. Coburn appeared in nearly 70 films and made over 100 television appearances during his 45-year career, and played a wide range of roles and won an Academy Award for his supporting role as Glen Whitehouse in Affliction.A capable,...

 and Julia Roberts

Julia Roberts

Julia Fiona Roberts is an American actress. She became a Hollywood star after headlining the romantic comedy Pretty Woman , which grossed $464 million worldwide...

.

One of the more unconventional qualities of the awards given out is that winners were given 5 acres (20,234.3 m²) of mountain top (if deep in the desert) land donated by independent film maker Jeff Jackson and his Taos Land and Film Co.

Past winners included Gary Walkow (Notes from Underground

Notes from Underground

Notes from Underground is an 1864 short novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Notes is considered by many to be the first existentialist novel...

), Constance Marks (Green Chimneys), Chris Eyre

Chris Eyre

Chris Eyre , an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, is a film director and producer.His films focus on all aspects of contemporary Native American life, while dispelling the usual stereotypes. Eyre's debut film, Smoke Signals , won the coveted Sundance Film Festival Filmmakers...

 (Smoke Signals

Smoke Signals (film)

Smoke Signals is an independent film directed and co-produced by Chris Eyre and with a screenplay by Sherman Alexie, based on the short story "This is what it means to say Phoenix, Arizona" from his book Lone Ranger and Tonto: Fistfight in Heaven. It won several awards and accolades, and was...

), David Riker (La Ciudad), Daniel Yoon (Post Concussion), and a lifetime achievement award for Guillermo Gómez-Peña

Guillermo Gómez-Peña

Guillermo Gómez-Peña was born in Mexico City and moved to the US in 1978, where he established himself as a performance artist, writer, activist, and educator. He has pioneered multiple media, including performance art, experimental radio, video, performance photography and installation art...

.

External links

• Taos Talking Pictures drops curtain New Mexico Business Weekly.
• Three festivals rise out of Taos Talking Pictures' ashes New Mexico Business Weekly.
• Promised Land, Jeff Jackson and the Taos Film Festival By Gerald Peary
  Gerald Peary
  Gerald Peary is an American film critic, who has been a reviewer and columnist for the Boston Phoenix since 1996. He was formerly the Acting Curator of the Harvard Film Archive and is currently the General Editor of the University Press of Mississippi Conversations with Filmmakers Series...
  
  
• Taos Land and Film Co. official website
• Land Grant Prize Articles