Tribeca Film Festival 2017
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Director Lana Wilson Talks Gaining Trust, Valuing Life and Her Wise, Empathetic Suicide Prevention Doc, The Departure
One of the major discoveries of the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival, Lana Wilson’s The Departure is a beautiful, wise and deeply empathetic immersion into one fascinating character’s unique approach to suicide prevention. Ittetsu Nemoto is a former punk rocker turned Buddhist priest who, in quietly wrenching group sessions, counsels the suicidal while facing down his own demons. Working in a small, remote temple in Japan, he constructs spare, philosophical rituals for his patients and then, separately, bonds with them in more personal, emotionally intimate ways. Following Nemoto both within his practice and outside of it, The Departure initially grabs hold […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 13, 2017 -
Five Questions for Nobody’s Watching Director Julia Solomonoff
In Julia Solomonoff’s third narrative feature, Nobody’s Watching, Guillermo Pfening plays Nico, an established Argentine actor in New York who has overstayed his visa in hopes of a promised film role and a new chance at life. But the idea of making it as an actor in New York is even harder for the blond Nico, who is told both that he is too white to play Hispanic and that his accent is too strong to play American. He falls back on odd jobs and light shoplifting, living under the radar until his past in Argentina comes back to haunt […]
by Ariston Anderson on May 24, 2017 -
“We’re Looking for People Who Think Weirder and Bloodier”: Eli Roth and Crypt TV Execs on Making Horror Shorts
“What we’re doing is building our own Marvel universe and ecosystem of characters”: Eli Roth on Horror & CryptTV at Tribeca Raise your hand if you’re trying to get a horror film made. I thought so. That’s a lot of us — myself included. It’s been a fantastic year for the genre, too, with Get Out breaking a number of records and becoming the third highest-grossing R-rated horror film of all time — and that’s behind The Exorcist and Hannibal. I was too terrified to finish either, and I saw Get Out twice (and alone) so it wins in my […]
by Meredith Alloway on May 2, 2017 -
Tribeca 2017 Critic’s Notebook: This Land Is Your Land
#Tribeca2017 came to a close last night, after a final day of screenings dominated by the many winners from both Thursday evening’s award ceremony, held at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, and Saturday evening’s audience award announcement. Among the dozens of awards the festival gives out, Rachel Israel’s New York-set romantic comedy Keep the Change, which centers on an autistic couple, took home the Founder’s Award for Best Narrative Feature, while Elina Psykou’s Son of Sofia took home the Best International Narrative Feature prize. Elvira Lind’s Bobbi Jene, already a favorite in these parts, swept the documentary prizes for Feature, […]
by Brandon Harris on May 1, 2017 -
Tribeca 2017: Five Questions with The Last Goodbye Co-director Ari Palitz
Perhaps the most powerful piece at this year’s Storyscapes, the Tribeca Film Festival’s annual survey of the biggest and best in new virtual reality work, was The Last Goodbye. The pieces’s concept is both simple and ambitious: to have a Holocaust survivor guide the viewer in a tour of the concentration camp where he was interned over seven decades ago. Pinchas Gutter, who as an eleven-year-old boy lost his entire family at the Majdanek Concentration Camp in Poland, fills this role admirably. Locations include the camp grounds, cells, and an incinerator, but despite the breathtaking technical achievement of the footage — in […]
by Randy Astle on May 1, 2017 -
Tribeca 2017: Five Questions with No Man’s Land Director David Byars
Documentary filmmaker David Byars had either the luck or the foresight that every first-time director envies. He had been following the patriot movement — a loose collection of rural conservatives who resent the federal government’s authority over issues like public lands — for years, focusing on emerging leaders of Cliven Bundy and his sons Ammon and Ryan and trying to piece together a story that would make a compelling film. So when the younger Bundys led an armed group of demonstrators to occupy the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Harney County, Oregon last year, Byars was prepared: he had the […]
by Randy Astle on Apr 30, 2017 -
Tribeca 2017: Five Questions with Rainbow Crow Producer Maureen Fan
One of my favorite virtual reality pieces at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival was the animated Invasion! from San Francisco-based Baobab Studios. The short film, directed by Baobab co-founder Eric Darnell, was reportedly downloaded over one million times (including in my household, where my kids loved its Google Cardboard version), making it the most-downloaded virtual reality piece yet, and in September a feature film adaptation was announced. Baobab thus had a high bar for their next project, so they launched two: Asteroids!, which premiered at Sundance in January, and now Rainbow Crow, which premiered this year at Tribeca. Following in the kid-friendly tradition of Darnell’s […]
by Randy Astle on Apr 30, 2017 -
Tribeca 2017: A Review of Tribeca Immersive
Alongside the Tribeca Film Festival’s film screenings and live events, the Tribeca Immersive exhibit at 50 Varick Street has been regularly packed full of attendees, with the enthusiasm of everyone from industry veterans to neophytes who have never seen a VR project before filling the space with energy. The event’s organizers, led by Ingrid Kopp, have done a stellar job in curating an excellent and diverse group of virtual reality and interactive projects from around the world, making Tribeca a leading global venue for new VR on par with Sundance or any other festival that includes virtual reality. I was gratified to see […]
by Randy Astle on Apr 30, 2017 -
Tribeca 2017: Erik Nelson on A Gray State
Originating as a concept trailer tapping into an increasingly burgeoning pocket of anti-police-state paranoia, David Crowley’s A Gray State was a film that warned of big government (FEMA = bad) taking over its innocent citizens to enslave and execute them. Like The Purge but with more guillotines and public massacres, Crowley’s footage depicted a low-budget world of state-led slaughter in the streets taking place to control those it sought to protect. A rebellion would be imminent, the story implies, and its tagline, “by consent or conquest,” sounds as much like generic action movie marketing as it does a patriotic call-to-arms. To doubters, the film would […]
by Erik Luers on Apr 28, 2017 -
Tribeca 2017: Drew Xanthopoulos on The Sensitives
There’s a certain feeling of disappointment when you knowingly choose to keep your cell phone, doubling as your alarm clock, near your face when settling in for an evening’s sleep. Having been warned of radiofrequency waves’ ability to cause cancer, keeping an electronic device that close to your brain for hours on end is not, we’re told, a wise decision to make. There are so many electric and synthetic materials in today’s everyday devices that to avoid them all would be to effectively remove yourself from modern society. You accept the potentially harmful results in order to live and work […]
by Erik Luers on Apr 28, 2017
