TRIBECA FILM FEST 6

POSTED APRIL 3, 2007

From April 25 to May 6, the Tribeca Film Festival returns with an eye-popping array of screenings.

It’s hard to talk about the Tribeca Film Festival without starting with the numbers. From 41 countries come nearly 250 movies selected from more than 4,500 entries.

Ask Peter Scarlet, director of the festival, about trends among all those many selections and he points out that one-sixth of the movies come from Spanish-speaking countries, or from New York’s Latino community.  (“A reflection of what’s going on in Latin America,” he says. “Filmmaking there is very strong.”) Twenty-four movies are from or about the Islamic world, with four about Afghanistan (including one feature shot entirely with a cell phone.)

Just one movie—“I Am an American Soldier: One Year in Iraq with the 101st Airborne”—comes from Iraq, but it’s unforgettable, Scarlet says. “My jaw dropped,” he said, as he witnessed the hardships faced by the camera crew. Fifty other documentaries are there for the choosing.

The festival is not all heavy going. For the sports enthusiast, a new sports-themed sub-festival will screen 14 feature length films, 12 of them world premieres. You lean towards shorts? Sixty-two appear in 10 different programs, each with a different theme.

The events begin April 25 with a series of seven shorts highlighting the crisis of global warming (followed by a party at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center, hosted by Al Gore). They conclude on May 5 with the world premier of “The Gates,” Antonio Ferrera and Albert Maysles’ documentary on Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s 2005 installation in Central Park of 7,500 fabric-paneled gates.

In between is an impressive variety of movies culled from a world-wide hunt that begins almost the day after the previous year’s festival ends. 

“It’s long and tiring,” Scarlet says of the globetrotting search, “but, ultimately, an ever-exciting process.”

More info is at www.tribecafilmfestival.org. Prices are $25 for premium screenings and panel discussions, $14 for matinee and family films, and $18 for general screenings. Downtown residents, students and seniors can get discount tickets (most are $2 off) at the festival box office,15 Laight St. Those for Downtown residents become available on April 13, a day before tickets are offered to the public.

SIDESHOWS

FAMILY STREET FEST
Beginning at 10 a.m. on Saturday, May 5, Greenwich Street again becomes all but unrecognizable as families flock by the thousands to see puppeteers, stiltwalkers, story tellers, dancers and much more. On the main stage: the Dirty Sock Funtime Band, David Grover and the Big Bear Band, and The National Double Dutch League, to name only a few.

At the same time, on North Moore between Greenwich and West Streets, the first annual “Sports Saturday” will take place. Interactive events will include a BMX bike jump show, a tennis clinic, a football “training camp,” and basketball activities sponsored by the NBA. The New York Red Bulls street soccer team will perform stunts and the New York Jets will host a football theme park. Numerous mascots, including Mr. Met, will be on hand.

PANELS
This year’s Tribeca Talks Panel Series covers everything from the role of pop culture in social justice (with former child soldier Ishmael Beah and many others) to stereotypes of science in the movies (with both scientists and filmmakers). For those in search of lighter topics, there will be two panels on Spiderman, one with the filmmakers who brought him to the screen and another with a group of superhero illustrators. Other topics include women in comedy, espionage in the movies, and the future of violence in film. Panels take place at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center, 199 Chambers St. Panels regularly cost $25, but Downtown residents with ID pay $22 at the box office. Go to www.tribecafilmfestival.org for a schedule.

THE ‘DRIVE-IN’
Neither in Tribeca nor a drive-in, the “Tribeca Drive-In” is one of the festival’s most popular events with local residents. This year’s outdoor screenings begin at 8 p.m. at Battery Park City’s North Cove: “Dirty Dancing,” preceded by a dance contest, on Thursday, April 26; the yet-to-be released animated feature “Surf’s Up” on Friday, April 27, with luau, limbo contest and flame jugglers before the show; and on Saturday, April 28 the documentary “Planet B-Boy” explores the hip-hop dance scene around the world. Tickets: free, first come basis. Doors open: 6:30 p.m.

DRAMA

The pull of family and the price of honor are at the heart of a number of dramatic films in the festival this year. WHERE GOD LEFT HIS SHOES is perhaps the most uplifting among them. The story follows a failed boxer (John Leguizamo) as he attempts to secure a job on Christmas Eve and move his family out of a homeless shelter. SHOTGUN STORIES is a tale set in rural Arkansas about a blood-feud between families. DAY ZERO examines what it means to “serve with honor” as the draft is reinstated and three young men prepare for duty. The work examines their conflicting attitudes toward war.  Meanwhile, in ZOLYKHA’S SECRET, a rural Afghan family struggles to hang on during the final years of Taliban rule and the onset of the American invasion. A pair of intellectually gifted brothers make disparate life choices—one is a doctor, one is a drug addict—in GOOD TIME MAX. And in FIESTAPATRIA, a pending wedding brings two families together, but a dark secret threatens to tear them apart.

DOCUMENTARIES

War stories, from the daily routine of the soldier, to the devastation it leaves in its wake, to the

lingering effect on families forced to leave their homeland and loved ones behind, dominate the documentary field this year. Among them is I AM AN AMERICAN SOLDIER: ONE YEAR IN IRAQ WITH THE 101ST AIRBORNE which follows the army’s 101st Airborne Division, documenting their training, deployment to Iraq and finally their return home. Soldiers are candid in interviews about the experience, revealing more about themselves and the war than can be related in brief news accounts from the front.

WHY DIDN’T ANYBODY TELL ME IT WOULD BECOME THIS BAD IN AFGHANISTAN was shot entirely with a cell phone, and is mostly dialog free. The work from Dutch filmmaker Cyrus Frisch offers a startling fresh perspective on “the other war.” Also from Afghanistan, comes POSTCARDS FROM TORA BORA. The film follows co-director Kelly Dolak, whose family fled the country during the 1979 Soviet invasion, as she returns to her home in search of her past, and her father. Similarly in FORGING A NATION (HACER PATRIA), director David Blaustein invites his family to join him as they retrace the steps of his Jewish ancestors who fled Europe in the 1920s in hopes of forging a better life in Argentina. From close to home comes another tale of the fallout of war, BEYOND BELIEF. The film offers a remarkable tale of a pair of widows who lost their husbands in the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. After the onset of the subsequent war, the women travel to Kabul to seek out and help other widows. NANKING documents an unlikely partnership of Nazi businessmen and American missionaries, who together worked to save an estimated 250,000 lives following the Japanese occupation of Nanking during World War II. The film draws on letters, diaries and interviews with survivors to tell the tale. Another unlikely alliance, this one in the West Bank, is documented in A SLIM PEACE, which follows 14 women—Israelis, Palestinians, Bedouin Arabs and America settlers among them—as they work together on a shared goal of losing weight.

Not all of the subjects are viewed against the backdrop of war. There is PETE SEEGER: THE POWER OF SONG, which features interviews and archival footage to document the lasting work of one of the world’s most important folk singers. And there is TOOTIES LAST SUIT which follows Chief Tootie Montana, a Mardi Gras Indian chief and New Orleans icon known for his dazzling carnival costumes, as he attempts a late-life comeback.

Still, conflict is the central theme, even when the subject is as seemingly inconsequential as a video game. In THE KING OF KONG the camera captures the competitive world of gaming, where it seems there is a dispute over who is the actual world record holder for the highest score ever in Donkey Kong.

LIGHTER FARE

The punch line gets the laughs, but the real comedic craft is in the set up. Comic offerings at the festival this year promise a number of plot-driven pieces, and not a one of them include a rabbi and a priest walking into a bar. Among them are MY BEST FRIEND, from French director Patrice Leconte, which tells the tale of a successful but widely disliked art dealer who is challenged to produce an actual friend in ten days, or lose a valued vase. YOU KILL ME features an alcoholic contract killer (Ben Kingsley) forced to take up work as a funeral home assistant. TUYA’S MARRIAGE is an odd tale about a shepherdess on the Mongolian steppe who divorces her ailing husband and suffers a string of proposals from quirky suitors. A hotel-casino heir (Woody Harrelson) attempts to save the family business from developers by entering the Grand Championship of Poker in THE GRAND. An aging boxer (Adam Carolla) 20-years past his prime attempts a come back, and a spot on the U.S. Olympic team in THE HAMMER. And then there is the unlikely tale of CHARLIE BARTLETT, an insecure teen whose popularity soars when he passes himself off as the school psychiatrist.

KID FRIENDLY

It’s tricky business programming for kids as the audience tends to be a moving target, ranging from the easy to please 4-year-old, to the hyper elementary schooler, to the disaffected teen. The festival this year includes a range of films, from shorts to full length features and CGI animated tales, selected to please all age groups. For the little ones there is IMPY’S ISLAND, a CGI animation with a
cast of characters that include a penguin, lizard and shoebill. But the real star is likely to be the baby dinosaur. GUMBY: THE MOVIE, featuring the claymation character first made popular on the Howdy Doody Show in the 1950s, is an easy romp from 1995 that finds Gumby rejoining his band, the
Clayboys.

For ages 10 and older there is CHASING 3000. Based on a true story, the film (starring Ray Liotta) is the tale of two brothers, one of them afflicted with muscular dystrophy, who drive from Los Angeles to Pittsburgh in 1972 for the chance to see baseball player Roberto Clemente get hit number 3,000. BRAVE STORY, from Japan, has all the elements of a fantastic tale—a brave boy, a magic gateway, a quest, demon dragons, and the granting of a wish.

For the young teen, there is EYE OF THE DOLPHIN. The film is the story of a 14-year-old girl who moves to the Bahamas to live with her father, a dolphin researcher. And there is the documentary DARIUS GOES WEST: THE ROLL OF HIS LIFE, in which a wheel chair-bound 15-year-old sets off with friends in a cross country RV trip in hopes of convincing MTV’s Pimp My Ride to trick out his wheelchair. Family films are $14, but only $12 for Downtown residents.

OUT OF THE PAST

Among the films seeking a new audience at the festival this year are revived masterworks from international directors, some of the unseen in America, some censored, others overlooked in their time. NIGHT OF THE HUNCHBACK (from 1965) is such a film. Directed by Jalal Moghaddam, the work is considered a masterpiece of Iranian cinema, but has rarely been seen in the West. The dark comedy follows an acting troupe as they make one elaborate but doomed attempt after another to dispose of the body of an actor. TO DIE A LITTLE (MORIR UN POCO) (Chile, 1966) was unearthed  only last year and has not been screened for audiences in four decades—and never before in North America. MEMORIES ABOUT SAYAT NOVA is much more recent (Armenia, 2006) but includes never-before seen scenes from the 1968 film “Sayat Nova,” considered a masterwork from director Sergei Paradjano, which was banned by the Soviet Union. THE PELICAN (France, 1973) makes its first appearance in the states. The film is directed by Gérard Blain who in his heyday was dubbed “the French James Dean.” Far more well known is ATTICA, an explosive documentary from 1974 that examines the infamous 1971 prison rebellion which ended with 32 prisoners and 11 hostages killed. The reprint is likely to shock audiences anew.

DARKER FARE

Sinister sheep run amok, rats on the rampage and a blood-thirsty creature unloosed from its
subterranean lair—the characters and plot points of the festival’s darker tales are decidedly wild. BLACK SHEEP is the story of a sheep farmer whose attempt to genetically engineer an animal goes horribly wrong. In UNEARTHED, an archaeologist in search of clues to the disappearance of an ancient tribe in New Mexico uncovers and unleashes a monster. Closer to home is MULBERRY STREET, set in Manhattan, which tells the tale of a rat-borne virus that turns its victims into zombie-rodents. It is left to recently priced-out tenants to save the day.

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