Tribeca Film Festival 2016
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Five Questions for The Last Laugh Director Ferne Pearlstein
Originally published during the Tribeca Film Festival, where the doc on humor and the Holocaust had its premiere, here is Paula Bernstein’s interview with director Ferne Pearlstein about The Last Laugh. The film is opening in theaters today and plays in New York at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas. There has been no shortage of documentaries about the Holocaust but, until now, none of them have featured Sarah Silverman, Chris Rock and Louis C.K. In Ferne Pearlstein’s The Last Laugh, which premieres today at the Tribeca Film Festival, she delves into the history of humor about the Holocaust, exploring the ethical questions […]
by Paula Bernstein on Mar 3, 2017 -
Five Questions for Burn Country Director Ian Olds
Every city has a learning curve. In Burn Country, opening today from Samuel Goldwyn, an exiled Afghan writer (Dominic Rains) arrives in rural California eager to immerse himself in the culture and customs of an American town. He befriends an unbalanced local (James Franco) in his search to “get to the source of things,” as he describes it, but the outsider soon becomes confronted by a culture he can’t quite comprehend. Burn Country marks Ian Olds’s first foray into fiction filmmaking after a pair of documentaries shot in Iraq and Afghanistan. Below, Olds speaks about the film’s origins, the Northern California landscape and his prior […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Dec 9, 2016 -
Notes on Vaxxed (Or, Not Lying But Being Wrong)
The thought stabbed itself into my mind, an ice-pick of fear: But what if I’m wrong? This was back in March. I had taken a short vacation from the hell of constant uncertainty in order to write an open letter to the Tribeca Film Festival about an anti-vaccination film called Vaxxed, directed by Andrew Wakefield. The letter contained the following premises: 1. Vaccines do not cause autism. 2. Wakefield is a well-known anti-vaccination quack. 3. Vaxxed is bullshit. I wrote the letter bolstered by the conviction that my premises were right, so I was pleased the letter received so much […]
by Penny Lane on Oct 13, 2016 -
Watch: Francis Ford Coppola on “Live Cinema” and His Career at Tribeca
One of the highlights of this year’s on-stage conversations at the Tribeca Film Festival was this sit-down between Francis Ford Coppola and his unlikely interrogator Jay McInerney. For years now, Coppola has been kicking around the concept of a “live cinema,” which is tricky to define, but he gets down to brass tacks in this conversation, which lasts just under an hour.
by Filmmaker Staff on Apr 27, 2016 -
Tribeca 2016: Five Questions for Keep Quiet Directors Joseph Martin and Sam Blair
A role reversal so outrageous it could only be a work of nonfiction, the story of Csanad Szegedi, an infamous member of Hungary’s conservative Jobbik party, is as preposterously true as they come. A former Holocaust denier and anti-Semite, Szegedi now lives as a practicing Orthodox Jew determined to honor his familial past (his grandparents were Jewish). Fascinated by this turnaround, filmmakers Joseph Martin and Sam Blair created Keep Quiet, an in-depth study of the new life of Szegedi and co-lead Rabbi Boruch Oberlande, as a portrait of internal religious tension and the endless trying struggle to right one’s wrongs. As Keep […]
by Erik Luers on Apr 25, 2016 -
Tribeca 2016: Exploring the Virtual Arcade
Tribeca is still a young festival — its fifteenth edition just wrapped last week — and though originally traditional films constituted its entire focus, soon transmedia, interactive work, and then virtual reality gained enough prominence that by 2016 they were as integral a part of the proceedings as the film screenings. This year more VR was on view than ever before at Storyscapes, the Interactive Playground, and the Virtual Arcade that together ran the length of the entire festival. By and large, the breadth and quality of the projects testify to the burgeoning craft of VR artists as the medium continues to […]
by Randy Astle on Apr 25, 2016 -
Tribeca 2016: Making Guy Maddin’s Seances Interactive
Watching Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson’s latest work Seances feels both familiar and utterly strange. Born from the knowledge that over 80% of silent movies have been lost, Maddin and his collaborators at the NFB wanted to resurrect as many titles — both real and invented — as possible: first in 2012 in production sessions at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Phi Centre in Montreal that were open to the public, then last year in the feature film The Forbidden Room, and now in an interactive version called Seances that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival’s Storyscapes event and is […]
by Randy Astle on Apr 25, 2016 -
Tribeca Critic’s Notebook #2: Obit and Contemporary Color
The day I sat down to write my second dispatch from Tribeca, Prince died. I took an hour to let the gut-punch settle. Most of us have that luxury, to just sit and sulk. Maybe we revisit an album or post a little thing on Facebook. We grieve that abstract grief over a person we never met. If you’re like me, you shut down and marinate in the art with a renewed appreciation. The subjects of Obit have a much harder job. They only get a minute to mourn. After that, they set about a seemingly impossible task: to encapsulate a […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Apr 24, 2016 -
Tribeca 2016: Five Questions for Obit Director Vanessa Gould
While there have been several documentaries exploring the inner-workings of the Gray Lady, the life and challenges of a New York Times obituary writer is a profession that has yet to receive its due. Working on strict deadlines that arrive at a moment’s notice (such is life and, in effect, death), these obit writers have to be on call to craft a minimal but effective summation of character while working with limited time and limitless resources. A fascinating subject that immediately evokes a plethora of questions (what’s the criteria for determining who gets a Times obituary? How quick is a […]
by Erik Luers on Apr 22, 2016 -
Tribeca 2016: Patrick Osborne on Winning an Oscar and his Animated VR Piece Pearl
Patrick Osborne came to national attention with his animated short Feast, a delightful film about a food-loving dog that screened with Disney’s Big Hero 6 and won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short for 2014. It dealt with family, loyalty, and growth and change over time, particularly the strain and eventual reward as new loved ones enter the circle of a previously cohesive relationship: it’s initially difficult for Winston, the dog, to accept his owner’s new girlfriend, but ultimately it is he who makes the decision to save the relationship and he enters a much wider and more loving world as a […]
by Randy Astle on Apr 22, 2016
