With festivals around the world struggling to keep their doors open and sponsors attached, the Tribeca Film Festival with its big name backers is no different as this year sponsors like Target and Cadillac bowed out and the number of features shown was cut down to 86, but still the fest is better off than most. TFF flexed its muscles leading up to its 8th edition (April 22 – May 3) with the announcement late last year that it's expanding to the Middle East with a sister festival in
Qatar and then came the stunning news earlier this year of
Geoff Gilmore joining Tribeca Enterprises as its Chief Creative Officer after being Sundance’s director for 19 years (soon after Peter Scarlet left his post as Tribeca’s artistic director). With this jolt of adrenaline, would it matter come festival time?
Screening 86 titles made TFF a more accessible experience this year and audiences came in droves, even though most of the fest was during some of the hottest late-April weather in recent memory. The fest opened with the world premiere of Woody Allen’s
Whatever Works (pictured above) at the Ziegfeld. His first time shooting in New York City in four films, it has received modest reviews, most noting the teaming of the two ultimate neurotics, Allen and the film’s lead Larry David. But for me, what keeps the film from going off the tracks is the performance of Evan Rachel Wood as a dimwitted southern belle. Most of her scenes are with David and she holds her own.
Allen’s film (which Sony Pictures Classics opens June 19) wasn’t the only coup TFF had over its soon-to-follow competitor, Cannes. Steven Soderbergh also passed on the Palais for TFF to premiere his latest low budget film,
The Girlfriend Experience, a non-linear look at the pre-economic downfall seen through the eyes of a high-end New York City escort played by adult star
Sasha Grey. Other notable titles in the Showcase section were Spike Lee’s made-for-TV documentary on basketball star Kobe Bryant,
Kobe Doin’ Work; Barry Levinson’s look at politics and Hollywood in
Poliwood, starring Anne Hathaway, Susan Sarandon and Sting. There was also Sundance favorites
In the Loop,
Black Dynamite and
Moon along with Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Toronto standout
Still Walking, a tender tale about a Japanese family’s secrets and regrets that includes amazing performances along with a keen script and editing by its director.
In the Premieres, Marshall Curry returned to TFF after receiving the Audience Award for his first film
Street Fight at the ’05 fest with his latest
Racing Dreams, which looks at the competitive world of go-cart racing (the film won the Best Documentary award); Ti West was the talk of blogsphere leading up to the fest with his
remarks on the final cut of his new horror
The House of the Devil, but there’s really not that much to his gripe (four minutes was cut from the middle of the film) and it’s a shame that’s how the film is getting attention at the moment because it is a gem of a horror film; actress Paola Mendoza shares the directing and screenwriting credits with Gloria La Morte in her first narrative feature,
Entre nos, a personal tale starring Mendoza in a gripping performance as a mother who’s recently abandoned by her husband and practically lives as a vagabond with her two children to get by; and Cyrus Frisch continues to challenge the audience with
Dazzle, another experimental look at troubled souls as well as life in Amsterdam (I blogged about these titles during the fest, read more
here). Another doc that grabbed attention was Gabriel Noble’s
P-Star Rising which takes a five year look at Priscilla Diaz, a feisty nine-year-old rapper who through the tutelage of her father rides the highs and lows of the recording business in search of fortune and fame; while Bradley Rust Gray’s
The Exploding Girl, though a very similar aesthetic to partner So Yong Kim’s
In Between Days, highlights the wonderful talents of lead actress Zoe Kazan, who has the perfect silent-film siren look for this intimate story about teen angst (Kazan was awarded the Best Actress award). Asghar Farhadi’s
About Elly won Best Narrative, and Raymond De Felitta’s
City Island won the Audience Award. (Unfortunately I didn't get to see either of these films.)
Never short on celebrities or parties, TFF has gradually begun to grab the attention of the New York cinephiles as general audiences not only attended the gala screenings where they can sit across from the actors in the films, but the less glamorous afternoon mid-week screenings were also very well attended. “All the films seemed really well received,” says the festival’s executive director Nancy Shafer after the fest. “I had no idea the matinees would all sell out, but it just goes to show you that people will change their schedules and figure out a way to get to films they want to see.” For Norweigen filmmaker Rune Denstad Langlo, who walked away with the Best New Filmmaker (Narrative) Award, he was stunned by the reception his film
North received. “This was the first time it played in North America and I imagined the audience would be different from Europeans,” he says. “But I was surprised they liked it and understood it so well. And the audiences stayed for the Q&A and were interested in how we make the film, that’s not usual in Europe.”
Though the festival has found a comfortable hub in Union Square (and Schafer says there is no plan to change the festival dates to the fall), there’s still the question of its relation to lower Manhattan. During the festival Anthony Kaufman jokingly called it the “Union Square Film Festival” on his blog, but Shafer says they have not forgotten about their namesake. “We would do more there but there are no movie theaters,” she says, stating the mainstays as being Tribeca Cinemas and the Tribeca Performing Arts Center. “We would love to have it all in Tribeca but we’re going to continue to do what we can there during the festival and year round.”
With that said, it was bizarre to watch a commercial that ran before every festival screening championing the festival as being a spotlight for lower Manhattan; inferring that people flock to the area throughout the fest. Walking around Greenwich St. – the heart of Tribeca – during the festival, outside of a few streetlight banners, you’d have no clue TFF was even going on. Though there’s an all-day fair on the street the last Saturday of the festival, store owners and restaurateurs told me that in the last few years when the festival had to move most of their screenings uptown, there’s been little increase in their businesses during the fest and there’s gradually been a lack of promotion by the festival in the area. “Do you see any advertisements down here?,” says a bartender at the Pig N’ Whistle. “We were talking the other day how there aren’t any flyers on the store fronts anymore. It was nice when it was all down here, now you have no clue where it is.”
Though TFF has come a long way in eight years to gradually build respect on the festival circuit and New York City film lovers alike, it seems they need to reconnect with their own backyard.
Labels: Festivals
# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 5/10/2009 11:05:00 PM
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