Ben Kinsley is a man who likes to dress up as a mushroom.

For the past several years, he and his creative team of Riitta Ikonen and Jessica Langley have attended the Telluride Mushroom Festival, which is famous for its costume parade and costume contest.

And each year, they’ve managed to crack the code and win awards for their costumes. There’s even a documentary, “Fest in Show,” about their costumes available on YouTube.

Last year, the trio built a 20-foot-long log and dressed up as Chlorociboria, a widespread genus of fungi that produces very small, blue-green cups. They wore form-fitting blue and green outfits and rode inside their log apparatus to imitate the microscopic mushrooms that grow on sticks.

“We dressed as the larger version and got wheeled through the parade,” said Kinsley, a professor and co-director of visual art in the University of Colorado Colorado Springs Department of Visual and Performing Arts.

“It’s a cool mushroom because it stains wood turquoise. In fine woodworking, you’ll see turquoise inlays – that’s wood turned turquoise by the mushroom.”

After winning their award, the trio made a four-minute film while in their costumes and submitted it to the 2025 Fungi Film Fest.

“It’s a fun way to get people excited about paying attention to the small things in the forest and scientifically documenting them,” Kinsley said. “You’ll learn about this genus and how to identify it. It’s edutainment (educational and entertainment). Educational in a way that helps people understand the importance of scientific collections and documentation of mushrooms you can find.”

Chanterelles, morels, waxy caps and puffballs. There’s no doubt about it – mushrooms are en vogue.

Fungi flew under the radar for centuries, says Peter McCoy, co-founder of Radical Mycology, a Portland, Ore.-based organization that helps promote the study of mycology, or fungi. But over the last 10 to 15 years, there’s been a cultural shift, and fungi fans have begun to cast a spotlight on the vital organisms that are so beneficial environmentally and biologically.

In 2020, McCoy founded the Fungi Film Fest, the world’s only film festival devoted to mushrooms, lichens and micro fungi, and it’s coming to Colorado Springs for the first time on Sunday, during Electrowave: The Rocky Mountain Electronic Festival at Ent Center for the Arts.

The festival will act as a fundraiser, with 30% of ticket sales going to the film festival, and the rest helping to support the University of Colorado Mycological Society, the student mushroom club at UCCS.

“For the bulk of Western civilization’s development, we’ve had a poor relationship with mycology, and a limited understanding,” McCoy said. “We’ve been ignorant of them until recently. In the last quarter of the 20th century, we began to understand how important they are. We’re developing an unprecedented relationship with an aspect of the natural world that we feared.”

How many films?
The 125-minute festival features 14 films of varying lengths, from a couple of minutes to 20 minutes, by filmmakers from around the world.

What kind of films?
All types: comedies, animation, music video abstract. This year leans more toward documentaries.

“A lot of people loved this year the most, this is what they’re more comfortable with, what they expect – more science-y, more straightforward. We have a couple of creative films this year,” McCoy said.

A few of the films

– “Caverns and Coprophilia”: A doctor and a biologist make scientific discoveries underground while collecting rare specimens of poop-loving fungi. (Documentary)

– “Awake: The Dark Night of the Soul”: A sad alien eats a magic mushroom trying to escape his problems, but suddenly starts a psychedelic trip to self-knowledge. (Animated, experimental)

– “Myconism”: Exploring what it would look like if humanity were born from a cult devoted to fungi. A combination of animation and photography imagines fungi being honored through values, prayers, dances and rituals in harmony with nature. (Experimental)

– “Savior – Mars FM”: A fuzzy little guy takes viewers through the forests of the Pacific Northwest, as he investigates mushrooms, until one mushroom helps him investigate himself. (Music video)

Another Colorado film in the festival

– “Peaks to Prairie: A Holistic Regenerative Approach”: Longmont-based filmmaker Chad Weber won the festival’s award for best edutaining film. The film shows how fungi are used to restore degraded lands in Boulder County. It depicts the cycle of better forest management to avoid wildfires.

“It’s better to trim trees and underbrush and take the underbrush out of the forest so it’s not fuel, and feed it to the mushrooms, grow mycelium, and apply that in degraded pasture land to build up the soil,” McCoy said.

IF YOU GO

What: Fungi Film Fest

When: 1-3 p.m. Sunday

Where: Ent Center for the Arts, 5225 N. Nevada Ave.

Price: $5-$15; entcenterforthearts.org