Tribeca Film Festival 2017
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Tribeca 2017: Five Questions with The Last Animals Director Kate Brooks
The Tribeca Film Festival has a history of showing tremendous new environmental documentaries, and this year the stand-out film in this area is Kate Brooks’ The Last Animals, a gut-wrenching investigation into the illicit ivory and rhino horn trade around the globe. When seen in conjunction with the short virtual reality piece The Protectors, which also features the rangers at Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, this feature-length doc shines a new light on an issue that is not as far from home as many North American viewers may suspect. At its world premiere screening last week the […]
by Randy Astle on Apr 27, 2017 -
Tribeca 2017: Five Questions with Blame Director Quinn Shephard
Most of the conversation surrounding Blame, a new film by writer-director-producer-editor-star Quinn Shephard, focuses on her age. At 22, she seems exceptionally young to be undertaking so many roles on a debut feature, but the results attest to her talent and drive. It should be said upfront that Blame is a poignant and incisive examination of modern American adolescence, as filtered through the lens of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and the Salem witch trials of 1692, which form the inspiration for this modern-day narrative. The film delves deepest into high school mean-girl culture — with excellent performances by Sarah Mezzanotte and Nadia Alexander, who […]
by Randy Astle on Apr 27, 2017 -
Coffee, Sake and Ambien: Writer/Director Richard Shepard on His Tribeca ’17 Short Film, Tokyo Project
An unexpected pleasure at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, Tokyo Project is a romantic drama with a psychological twist starring Elisabeth Moss and Ebon Moss-Bacharach and directed by Richard Shepard, whose career traverses dark comedies like The Matador and Dom Hemingway as well as some of the most memorable episodes of TV’s Girls. But what’s unexpected about this story of two American wanderers who hook up in Tokyo while both seemingly escaping their normal lives is, simply, its existence. The half-hour work is beautifully acted and shot (by Giles Nuttgens), coursing with a kind of romantic cinephilia, and, unlike other […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 26, 2017 -
Tribeca 2017: Five Questions for Flames DP Ashley Connor
Flames marks cinematographer Ashley Connor’s third feature collaboration with filmmaker, artist and performer Josephine Decker — she previously lensed Decker’s Thou Wast Mild and Lovely and Butter on the Latch — but this time there’s a twist. Decker “co-directed for a long time” (see the film and you’ll understand) with director Zefrey Thowell, and the movie bracingly, explicitly details the emotional, sexual and psychosexual gyrations of their turbulent eight-month relationship. The pair would often call Connor over to film a recreation of something that happened to them just a day earlier — like a bout of lovemaking leading to a […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 25, 2017 -
Tribeca 2017 Critic’s Notebook: Performance Anxiety
Ever searching for an identity, the Tribeca Film Festival returned — for a 16th time last week — to Midtown, the Upper West Side, Chelsea and, yes, the neighborhood for which it’s named. These days the festival never opens with a genuinely great (and thematically appropriate) film like Paul Greengrass’s United 93 or a goofy overstuffed blockbuster like J.J. Abrams’s Mission Impossible III, but usually with a low-key doc centered on iconic New York stuff: comedy (Bao Nguyen’s 2015 SNL doc opener Live from New York!), fashion (Andrew Rossi’s The First Monday in May, which opened last year’s edition) and music — the Nas doc which […]
by Brandon Harris on Apr 24, 2017 -
Tribeca 2017: Alon Benari on the VR Thriller, Broken Night
Currently running at the Tribeca Film Festival’s Virtual Arcade, Broken Night is a psychological thriller featuring a quarrelling couple (Emily Mortimer and Alessandro Nivola), an intruder and a handgun. Distilling these elements into 11 taut minutes, the piece throws viewers not just into the action but into the unsteady point-of-view of the short’s protagonist, the wife played by Mortimer, who is trying to reconstruct the events of one violent evening for an investigating police detective. Using a VR headset and browser-based player, Broken Night allows viewers to slip in and out of the wife’s POV, making for her character the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 24, 2017 -
“Triangle Below Canada”: On Opening Night, the Tribeca Film Festival Marches North
In the course of 85 years, the “Showplace of the Nation,” Radio City Music Hall, has hosted countless spectaculars, but few I suspect as geriatric as Wednesday night’s revue of strutting septuagenarians revisiting their classic hits from the AM radio era — Barry Manilow, Dionne Warwick, the late Maurice White (in the person of what’s left of Earth, Wind, and Fire), Carly Simon and Aretha Franklin. A few youngsters performed too, including Jennifer Hudson and Kenny G. You certainly wouldn’t mistake this for SXSW. Call it North by Northeast. (With a tip of the bowler to Hitch.) That would explain […]
by David Leitner on Apr 22, 2017 -
Tribeca ’17: Five Questions with Water Warriors Director Michael Premo
I saw Water Warriors in February, just a month after Donald Trump’s inauguration, during its world premiere at Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in Missoula, Montana. The short film and multimedia photo exhibition provided an element of much-needed hope at a time when the environment is increasingly imperiled by big business interests. But rather than focusing on dire statistics and predictions about climate change, Water Warriors highlights a rare success story of ordinary citizens — including members of the Mi’kmaq Elsipogtog First Nation, French-speaking Acadians and white, English-speaking families in New Brunswick, Canada — who fight to protect their water from the oil […]
by Paula Bernstein on Apr 21, 2017 -
Tribeca 2017: Exclusive Clip, Mark Grieco’s A River Below
“We need action!” That’s Richard Rasmussen, one of the two main subjects of Mark Grieco’s Tribeca documentary premiere, A River Below, in this exclusive clip provided to Filmmaker. The film, Grieco’s follow-up to the Sundance-premiering Marmato, has its first screening on April 22. Here, from the press materials, is a further description: A River Below is a gripping journey into the Amazon that follows a Brazilian wildlife TV star and a renowned marine biologist as they each attempt to save the endangered pink river dolphin from being hunted to extinction. As we burrow further into the Amazon, the film takes […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 20, 2017 -
28 Films, TV and VR Pieces We’re Excited About at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival
Kicking off tonight with an all-star Radio City concert following the premiere of the Clive Davis doc, The Soundtrack of Our Lives, the Tribeca Film Festival once more offers a near-overwhelming array of new work spread across not just film but TV, VR, gaming and music. The program has been slimmed down this year, say the programmers, but the below list of works we’re excited about could still stretch many times fold. Nonetheless, from myself and our various Tribeca contributors this year, here are 28 works we have reason to excitedly anticipate. The Departure. Lana Wilson follows up her abortion […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 19, 2017
