The Denver Film Festival, and, by extension, the city of Denver, are getting a big boost this week from Larry Wimore, the genial and endlessly interesting host of the popular podcast “Black on the Air.” Wilmore has been the guiding force behind some of the most popular and most impactful TV shows over the past 30 years – and in the process, he has helped to shape the broader cultural conversation. He does it each week on his podcast, which he taped here in Denver on Friday before a live audience at the Jacquard Hotel in Cherry Creek.

Wilmore started as a writer for 1990s hit shows like “In Living Color” and “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” before creating “The Bernie Mac Show,” which earned him an Emmy for writing. He served as the “Senior Black Correspondent” on “The Daily Show” from 2006-14, produced “Black-ish” and will forever be known (by me) as the diversity consultant on “The Office.”

His easygoing conversational style has helped make “Black on the Air” one of the most popular podcasts in America. No matter how hot the topic or distressing the headline, Wilmore has a way of reconsidering prevailing narratives on politics, race and comedy in a way that tends to help take our collective temperature down a few degrees. Always with insight, often with a laugh.

“I’m really trying to focus on uplifting content right now,” Wilmore told me. “Now, if I need to call something out, I’ll call it out. But what I like to do the most is to talk to people who can help me to get some kind of clarity on something that I’m curious or confused about. That’s what I strive for most of all. That’s what gives me joy.”

Wilmore was all-in on the 2023 Denver Film Festival. In fact, he has really been the face of this year’s festival. He was among the jurors who will select its category winners; he dedicated a full podcast episode to a conversation with Denver Film CEO Kevin Smith and Artistic Director Matthew Campbell; and, on Saturday, he moderated a funny and fascinating conversation with actor Sterling K. Brown after an added screening of the comedy everyone will soon be talking about, “American Fiction,” once it is widely released Dec. 15. (More on that convo tomorrow.)

Wimore gave Smith and Campbell a platform to introduce every aspect of the Denver Film Festival – and its unique place in the larger film ecology – to a national audience. Wilmore was particularly impressed with the festival’s diversity of programming, especially its variety of foreign genres.

“I love that you have so many international films,” he said. “I feel like, overall, there’s been a burst of what I call ‘Columbus-ing’ – that’s when it comes to international content – discovering something that’s been there all along.”

LISTEN TO LARRY WILMORE’S PODCAST FROM THE DENVER FILM FESTIVAL

They also talked about the actors’ strike and its impact on the industry, the opportunities and challenges of streaming, and the future of bricks and mortar cinemas. Throughout, Wilmore’s love for film exuded out of his pores. Asked to name films that have become part of his DNA, he cited three insanely different titles: “Cinema Paradiso,” “Apocalypto” and “Cooley High.”

The podcast episode was dropped on Friday. You can listen to it on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

CINEMAQ AWARD WINNER

British director Andrew Haigh received the festival’s CinemaQ LaBahn Ikon Film Award – presented to an outstanding entertainment contributor from the LGBTQIA+ community – prior to a screening of “All of Us Strangers” at the Denver Botanic Gardens. It’s a deeply moving, metaphysical story of a young London writer named Adam (Andrew Scott, aka “the hot priest from ‘Fleabag’”) who is living fully in both his isolation and his imagination at once.

When Adam is drawn back to his childhood home, he discovers his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) living out their lives just as they were on the day they died 30 years before, when Adam was just 12, leaving him an orphan. The story is adapted from Taichi Yamada’s 1987 novel “Strangers,” but has been fully sculpted into Haigh’s own. So much so, he filmed much of the story in his own, real-life childhood home.

“There was something interesting to me about having a reunion with your past, and your younger self,” Haigh told me before the screening. “As an adult, you think you’ve moved away from who you used to be as a kid. But trauma lingers, and you have to work through it as you get older – and older. So to make a film where someone is essentially meeting the ghosts of his dead parents was a really fascinating way for me to explore my own ideas about family and love.”

“All of Us Strangers” will be released in theaters Dec. 22. Multiple Oscars have been predicted.

SCREENING OF THE DAY

The “unofficial” programming focus of the 2023 fest has been on Ukraine, and much talk has centered on a documentary called “In the Rearview,” which simply shows what a dashboard camera atop a volunteer aid van picks up as volunteers try to rescue people from their villages and towns. In its original way, the film offers an authentic observation of war as it is unfolding and gives voice to the desperate everyday citizens caught in the crosshairs. “I’ll just say the most daring part of this movie is that there really is no story – but you can’t stop watching it,” said Denver Film’s Matthew Campbell. 5 p.m. at the AMC9, 826 Albion St.

WHAT ELSE IS HAPPENING TODAY?

The fest will announce its annual award winners at a public brunch at 11 a.m. at the Jacquard Hotel. Films were judged by a panel of media and industry professionals from around the country.

Several have come to Denver for all the fest festivities, including Larry Wilmore, actor Tawny Cypress (“Yellowjackets”), Hollywood makeup artist Donald Mowat, “Barbie” producer Bronte and journalists from NY Mag, Vanity Fair, Variety and Deadline.

Another is young actor Maxwell Whittington-Cooper, who will appear in the big Oscar-buzz film “Rustin,” opening Nov. 17.

Whittington-Cooper plays historical giant John Lewis in a stirring biopic about activist Bayard Rustin (played by Colman Domingo), architect of the momentous March on Washington in 1963. Lewis was one of the “Big Six” civil-rights leaders in the 1960s, and he continued the fight for 25 years in Congress.

“Holy smokes, it was such an immense honor to step into the role of John Lewis – and a little bit scary, of course, because he is such a fixture and icon in American history,” said Whittington-Cooper, who, alas, does not get to utter Lewis’ famous directive: “Get in good trouble” in the film.

RYDING THAT RISING STAR

At this morning’s awards brunch, actor Talia Ryder will receive the festival’s Rising Star Award for her work in “The Sweet East,” about a high-school senior from South Carolina who embarks on an oddball journey up the Eastern seaboard and down the rabbit hole of “The Weird New America.” But theater geeks like me know Talia and her sister, MiMi, from the Broadway cast of “Matilda the Musical” (MiMi played Matilda; Talia played Lavender and Hortensia).

“That show changed my life,” Talia said. “It was the reason I got to move to New York City, and it was the reason I ever considered acting as a profession. I never wanted to be an actor, but the magic of that show and that performance changed everything.”

For the first time since “Matilda,” the sisters are working together again – in “The Sweet East.”

“When I read the script and I saw that I had a cousin who comes into the very last scene, I said, ‘Oh, it has to be MiMi, obviously,’” Talia said. “It’s really funny. MiMi’s not a smoker at all, and she smokes a cigarette in that scene. One of the producers was like, ‘Should we tell her that she’s doing it wrong?’ But (director Sean Price Williams) said, ‘No, leave it.’ It’s my favorite scene in the whole movie.”

TITLE OF THE DAY

“Going Varsity in Mariachi” follows the competitive world of high-school mariachi music in the South Texas borderlands through one school that’s trying to turn a diverse crew of inexperienced musicians into state champions on a shoestring budget. 2:15 p.m. at the AMC9.

INFORMATION AND TICKETS

Go to denverfilm.org

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