TELLURIDE, Colo. — Spending time at a film festival is like living inside an accordion. Time expands and contracts — months are compressed into a few hours of screen time, and a day of screenings lasts a week — and you can’t always extract the music from the noise. The Telluride Film Festival, which spans each Labor Day weekend in this high-altitude former mining town, is an old-time squeeze box wired up to a Dolby sound system.

Literally: Dolby is a sponsor, with a booming promo that plays at the start of many screenings here. And this festival, which prides itself on its low-key, locavore vibe — movie stars mingle with tourists and students on Colorado Avenue; critical buzz takes shape in lines rather than online — transmits a loud and resonant signal to the movie world below.

That is partly because of people like me, who wander the streets and loiter in the queues with the same badges as everyone else. Unlike most major festivals, Telluride doesn’t issue press credentials, but the number of journalists in attendance has grown in recent years, both a cause and an effect of the festival’s elevated profile. Last week, just before the lineup of films was announced, Vanity Fair published an admiring profile of Julie Huntsinger, the festival’s co-director, declaring her “the most important Hollywood tastemaker you’ve never heard of.”

In the article, Ms. Huntsinger reiterated, in forceful language, the often-heard dictum that Telluride does not care about the Oscars. That may be true, but to paraphrase something Leon Trotsky supposedly said about something else, the Oscars care about Telluride. Eight best-picture winners in the last decade made their North American debuts here, most recently “Moonlight” whose director, Barry Jenkins, had been part of the festival’s staff. (This year, for old times’ sake, he programmed a selection of short films.)