
Know Your Mushrooms
Mycologists Gary Lincoff and Larry Evans lead a tour through the fungi obsessed subculture that gathers each year at the Telluride Mushroom Festival in Colorado. Ron Mann's camera follows them into the woods on hunts for chanterelles, morels, and the more notorious psychoactive and poisonous species, with foragers comparing spore prints and swapping identification tips learned the hard way. The film mixes hallucinatory animated sequences with talking-head interviews from festival regulars, herbalists, and self-taught experts who treat mushroom hunting as part science and part obsession. Lincoff's decades of field knowledge anchor the film, but the real subject is the community itself: people who read a forest floor the way others read a map, drawn by curiosity, appetite, and in some cases the promise of an altered state. Archival clips and old instructional footage add a comic layer to what is otherwise a serious case for paying attention to the fungal kingdom underfoot.