Tribeca Film Festival
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New Paths Forward: The Immersive and Interactive Works at Tribeca 2021
As the first major festival to return in person as the pandemic recedes, Tribeca gave us one more sign that New York is coming back. In the Heights, which opened the festival at the United Palace on June 9, was a joyful celebration of community (even for those of us who watched at home), and even in a reduced capacity the festival was a wonderful opportunity to reconnect with the movies. It also seemed that after shuttering the 2020 festival, this year’s event was fairly bursting at the seams with new types of content—of course the short and feature films […]
by Randy Astle on Jun 30, 2021 -
“Resisting the Power of the White Gaze”: CJ Hunt on his Tribeca-Premiering Confederate Monuments Doc, The Neutral Ground
CJ Hunt is a NYC-based comedian and filmmaker, and currently a field producer on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. But back in 2015 Hunt was still a resident of New Orleans, having spent nearly a decade teaching in its school (and after-school) system, assisting in its public defender’s office — and yes, pursuing his passion for comedy at night. So when Mayor Mitch Landrieu announced he’d be asking the city council to remove four monuments to the losing side in the Civil War, the stand-up/educator immediately thought to call his good friend (producer Darcy McKinnon, a “25 New Face” […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jun 18, 2021 -
“An Overt Anti-Patriarchal, Anti-Assimilationist Gesture Within the Framework of ‘Queer Refusal'”: Angelo Madsen Minax on His Tribeca-premiering North By Current
One of the most thrillingly radical aspects of Angelo Madsen Minax’s astonishing North By Current, which premiered at the Berlinale and now makes it North American debut at Tribeca, is the film’s centering of absence, of its maker’s firm belief in the idea that “a viewer is not entitled to every piece of information.” Minax began shooting North By Current upon his return home to rural Michigan after the death of his niece, a toddler whose passing put Minax’s emotionally fragile sister and her formerly incarcerated husband in the crosshairs of Children’s Protective Services (which in turn led to law […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jun 14, 2021 -
“… the Convergence of Many Different Narratives Clashing All at Once”: Dan Chen on his Tribeca-Debuting High School and College Admissions Doc, Accepted
Filmmaker Dan Chen planned to make an inspiring doc about a group of high-achieving students attending a most unconventional school in rural Louisiana, one that had a 100 percent college acceptance rate and sent its BIPOC kids to the likes of Harvard, Yale and Stanford. Well, so much for best laid plans. Unfortunately, right in the midst of production, the Ivy League dreams of Alicia, Adia, Isaac and Cathy, along with the rest of their classmates who were already under immense pressure from the unrelenting boot camp tactics of the school’s founder Mike Landry, morphed into a slow-motion nightmare. Even […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jun 14, 2021 -
“I’m Drawn to Spaces Where the Paradoxes of Everyday Life are Made Apparent”: Jessica Kingdon on her Tribeca-Premiering Ascension
An all-female factory floor that manufactures made-to-order sex dolls (which seems every bit as titillating as crafting car parts). A workshop featuring a social media entrepreneur who rhapsodizes about the “fan economy.” (Why be a regular boss when you can be a “star boss”?) An instructor in a class on business etiquette quizzing the Stepford Wives-creepy assemblage on how many teeth should be displayed when smiling at a client. (The correct answer? The “upper eight teeth.”) A dinner conversation in which the wealthy discuss the pros and cons of vacationing in Xinjiang. These are just a few of the unnerving glimpses […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jun 14, 2021 -
“Can Jupiter Use his Powers and Wisdom to… Rectify Racial Injustice and Inequality?”: Ram Devineni and Yusef Komunyakaa on their Tribeca-Premiering AR Comic Book Jupiter Invincible
Jupiter Invincible, the latest augmented reality comic book from Ram Devineni and his NY-based Rattapallax media house, marks a bit of a departure for the doc filmmaker and technologist. Best known in the AR world for his comic book series Priya’s Shakti — starring India’s first female superhero and rape survivor (and UN Women-designated “gender equality champion”) — Devineni now travels both back to these shores and back in time, all the way to pre-Civil War Maryland. And he brings along an impressive trio of collaborators. Our superhero of this tale, the titular Jupiter, is the invention of the Pulitzer […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jun 9, 2021 -
As the Calendar Rolls Around: Producers and Sellers on the Pandemic-Altered ’21 Festival Season.
For more than 40 years, there was a certainty to the film festival calendar—a comfort in knowing that, since 1978, when the Berlin International Film Festival moved to February, followed by Cannes in May, and Venice in the fall, there were three distinct seasons for producers, sales agents and buyers to meet, see films and make deals. But in 2021, things are different, of course. While the inflection points of the business cycle—winter, summer, fall—remain somewhat in place, the ongoing pandemic has scrambled the dates, formats and plans for hundreds of film events, upending launch strategies and causing potential logjams […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Apr 8, 2021 -
“I Don’t Want to Work in a Place Where I Can’t Touch the Camera”: Gerardo Naranjo on Tribeca 2020 Premiere Kokoloko
A girl, a number of guns, also some cars: recombining knowingly archetypal elements from Gerardo Naranjo’s first two features, Drama/Mex and I’m Gonna Explode, Kokoloko is delightfully loose and unconstrained. In Oaxaca, Marisol (Alejandra Herrera) loves Mundo (Noé Hernández), much to the disapproval of her thuggish cousin Mauro (Eduardo Mendizábal), who literally picks her up and throws her in his car to separate the two. The not-quite-love-triangle unfolds in a larger, equally unsettled arena: road blockades are plotted, cartels are in orbit, and violence erupts at every level. The beachside backdrop recalls the Acapulco setting of Drama/Mex, Marisol and Mundo’s lovers-on-the-run arc I’m […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 23, 2020 -
Tribeca 2019 Critic’s Notebook: Coming(s) of Age
Blood and guts in high school is a theme that never loses its appeal to filmmakers, even as its universality—from Zero for Conduct to Heathers—demands greater risk and originality from filmmakers who, arguably more often than not, are recasting episodes from their own diaristic memory banks. This year’s Tribeca Film Festival, which wrapped up last week, served up a predictable share of films that fit into the coming-of-age category, yet the most notable of those efforts proved to be anything but cookie-cutter. The best film I saw at the festival, Jennifer Reeder’s Knives and Skin, even felt like something brand […]
by Steve Dollar on May 13, 2019 -
Tribeca 2019 Critic’s Notebook: Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, Rewind, 17 Blocks, All I Can Say
Now that every 10-year-old has a pocket-sized film studio and multiplex in their hands via the smartphone, and debates over the cinematic legitimacy of streaming platforms rage on, there’s a certain sweet nostalgia associated with dead formats of a less pixel-saturated age. VHS was perhaps the most physical—and vulnerable—of physical media: cheap plastic shells containing magnetic tape that could easily tangle in a faulty player. Yet, along with the camcorder, which likewise came into common use in the early 1980s, it has found a permanent niche in pop-culture consciousness that is, perhaps, greedy for a certain archival innocence—a throwback to […]
by Steve Dollar on May 7, 2019
