Some stories begin with a grand plan. The Breckenridge Film Festival is not one of them.
In the early 1980s, a mayor and a prominent local businessman walked into the Breckenridge Tourism Office with a simple ask: we need more business here in September, can you start a film festival? The two women sitting across from them looked at each other and said, sure. Then, as Meg Lass later recalled with a laugh, “we knew nothing. I mean, nothing.”
What followed was 46 years of independent film in the Rocky Mountains.
Meg co-founded the Breckenridge Film Festival in 1981 alongside her best friend, Mary Rianoshek. Meg was the director of the Tourism Office at the time, Mary was the events coordinator, and together they figured it out from scratch. They leaned on contacts, called in favors, and pulled off something nobody had done at altitude before. At a time when Colorado’s only film festivals were in Telluride and Denver, Meg and Mary carved out a third home for cinema in the mountains.
She stayed connected to the festival, on and off, for 43 years. That kind of staying power is not about obligation. It is about love.
In 2023, Meg sat down to reflect on all of it. She talked about the early days with characteristic warmth and humor. She remembered the picnics at Spruce Valley Ranch, where Hollywood guests would finally exhale. She remembered Jeffrey Lyons, the New York film critic whose connections made the earliest programming possible. She talked about what made Breckenridge different from other festival towns: the beauty, yes, but more than that, the welcome. “It is a very relaxed, welcoming experience for people,” she said. “That’s what I think sets it apart.”
She was equally clear-eyed about what the festival had grown into. When Breck Film opened the Eclipse Theater, Meg called it “absolutely huge.” She saw the year-round programming, the Film Society, the Winter Film Series, and the record-breaking submission numbers, and said she was “in awe and shock” that something she helped start in 1981 had become this.
And when she talked about her co-founder, her best friend, after more than four decades of shared history, she said: “My best friend is still my best friend. That says something.”
It says everything.
Meg served on Breck Film’s board and remained an active supporter of the organization alongside her husband, David. She and David sponsored screenings and believed in this community’s capacity for something extraordinary, because she had watched that belief proved right, again and again, for 44 years.
We lost Meg this spring. We are still absorbing what that means.
What we know is this: every film that screens, every filmmaker who feels genuinely welcomed, every September that the mountains fill with stories, carries a thread back to a morning in the Breckenridge Tourism Office when Meg Lass said yes without knowing exactly how. That grit, that warmth, that quiet willingness to build something from nothing, is the foundation this festival stands on.
Thank you, Meg. We were lucky to have you in our orbit for this long.
Our hearts are with David and the Lass family.
To read Meg’s own words, visit her 2024 interview on our website.
