Tribeca Film Festival 2015
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Anagram Creators May Abdalla and Amy Rose on Door into the Dark
The best work I saw at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival wasn’t a film at all. It was, instead, a lovely piece of conceptual counterprogramming in Tribeca’s Storyscapes section, Door into the Dark. An immersive theater piece by May Abdalla and Amy Rose of the U.K.-based company Anagram, Door into the Dark wasn’t positioned by curator Ingrid Kopp against the films in the festival. Rather, by including Door into the Dark within a program largely dominated by Oculus Rift VR work, Kopp used Door in the Dark‘s simply generated yet expansive mindscapes as a way of setting a high bar […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 4, 2015 -
Gregory Bayne and Christian Lybrook on their Tribeca N.O.W. Series, Zero Point
Screening in the Tribeca Film Festival’s Tribeca N.O.W. section (as in, “new online work”) is Gregory Bayne and Christian Lybrook’s Zero Point, a 45-minute independently-produced pilot for what the two Idaho-based creators hope will be full-on television series. Director, producer and screenwriter Bayne is well known to Filmmaker readers by virtue of his various documentaries (Jens Pulver Driven, Bloodsworth) and opinion pieces, and he’s been at the DIY distribution forefront long before it was in vogue. So, perhaps its appropriate, then, that he and producer and screenwriter Lybrook are now early adopters of a new indie model: rather than make […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 25, 2015 -
The 2015 Tribeca Film Festival Awards
Below are the winners of this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. Note that the narrative awards were split evenly between Virgin Mountain and Bridgend, with three apiece. WORLD NARRATIVE COMPETITION CATEGORIES: The jurors for the 2015 World Narrative Competition sponsored by AKA, were Paul Attanasio, Sophie Barthes, Whoopi Goldberg, Dylan McDermott, and Burr Steers. ● The Founders Award for Best Narrative Feature – Virgin Mountain, written and directed by Dagur Kári [Iceland, Denmark]. Winner receives $25,000, sponsored by AT&T, and the art award “Ash Eroded Film Reel” by Daniel Arsham. The award was given by Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Apr 23, 2015 -
Tribeca 2015 Critic’s Notebook: When I Live My Life Over Again, Dirty Weekend, Applesauce and Bad Hurt
It’s awards day at Tribeca and judging by the informal polling taking place at parties with free booze and in line at the Shake Shack next to the Regal Battery Park, the cinerati thinks this was a lukewarm edition. The fest’s first weekend provided more than its fair share of dreary viewing, with no films like last year’s still-unreleased Noah Buschel stunner Glass Chin or Angus MacLachlan’s unfairly overlooked Goodbye to All That to salve my hunger for top-shelf small movies that ought to matter. The festival surely has some strong surprises I haven’t uncovered, but time is running out; around mid-fest, everyone’s […]
by Brandon Harris on Apr 23, 2015 -
Guess Who’s Watching: Tribeca’s New Online Work
Tribeca’s N.O.W sidebar is noteworthy for two reasons: first, in that it aims to put forth the idea of the independent filmmaker as a brand, rather than the purveyor of a specific project, and secondly, because it suggests that the most successful online content is made for a clearly defined audience, or at least contains eye-catching enough packaging that can propel through the glut. “My Life in Sourdough” and “Eat Your Feelings”, for instance, call on the rather deep bullpen of internet foodies by situating a recipe at the center of each episode. The latter is boy meets girl plus 6 AM homemade pasta, and readymade for the […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Apr 23, 2015 -
Of Tarantino and TV: The Legacy of Goodfellas
In the mid-1980s, Martin Scorsese was regaining his footing as a director after a brutal few years. His passion project, The Last Temptation of Christ, had fallen apart at Paramount just days before production was scheduled to begin, and The King of Comedy had been a commercial, and largely critical, failure – in spite of the fact that it was, and is, one of the most incisive films ever made about celebrity culture. After years of working on studio movies with substantial budgets and luxurious schedules, Scorsese went back to ground zero for After Hours in 1985, stripping his methods […]
by Jim Hemphill on Apr 22, 2015 -
Five Questions for Peggy Guggenheim — Art Addict Director Lisa Immordino Vreeland
Lisa Immordino Vreeland’s feature debut, 2011’s Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel, examined the life and legacy of the legendary fashion photographer. The filmmaker was the granddaughter-in-law of her subject, and the film established Vreeland’s acumen in reconstructing the life stories of complex, powerful women. That applies to her new subject, Peggy Guggenheim, from whose candid memoirs the subtitle Art Addict was drawn. Almost as well known for her numerous relationships, sexual and otherwise, with many of the key creative figures of her time, Guggenheim’s story is reconsidered in this documentary. The film premiered last night at the Tribeca Film Festival; […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 21, 2015 -
Tribeca 2015: MA and Uncertain
Everyone, even The New York Times, is up in arms about the quality disparity in documentary to narrative programming at the Tribeca Film Festival, and it’s with reluctance that I add my voice to the heap. It figures then that the festival’s strongest narrative selection thus far was a work-in-progress screened in far flung Long Island City with negligible publicity fanfare. The “progress” modifier appeared to be fulfilled by a truncated end credit sequence, which director Celia Rowlson-Hall accounted for by reading off a list of names in a squat from the stage to prevent her arms from shaking. When the lights went down in the WV dome […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Apr 21, 2015 -
Five Questions for Applesauce Writer/Director Onur Tukel
Onur Tukel’s Summer of Blood was a hit of the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival, a work that saw the Brooklyn filmmaker venture from the relationship comedy drama of his previous pictures towards a sly, anarchic genre tale — in this case, a vampire story. Far from a generic riff on the genre, it contained all of Tukel’s typical emotional queasiness and edgy humor while adding quite a bit of the red stuff. With Applesauce, his latest, Dylan Baker plays the role of a man coaxed into recounting a story from his past on a radio show one day. He probably […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 20, 2015 -
Tribeca 2015 Critic’s Notebook: Live from New York, Ludacris, The Survivalist, Crocodile Gennadiy and More
The Tribeca Film Festival isn’t going away. The 47 people who care about the lives and deaths of film festivals ask the same question every year: Is this brash upstart turned middle-aged guy relevant? The national news media seems, well, not to care. In the film media, all anyone talked about the day after opening night was the unveiling of the Star Wars trailer and the Cannes lineup. But while Tribeca will never represent the pinnacle of Hollywood commerce or European high art in the way the Star Wars and Cannes brands do, its selections and sensibilities do their best […]
by Brandon Harris on Apr 18, 2015
