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The Festival, Seen Through a Filmmaker’s Bleary Eyes
By Barry Owens
“It’s like a magic wand,” James Bai said of the Tribeca Film Festival all-access
pass that dangled from his neck. “I wave it anywhere, and I’m in.”
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It was midafternoon and the young filmmaker, wearing a baseball
cap and sunglasses and still nursing a hangover from his post-premiere
party the night before, waved the pass to get into a VIP lounge
in the Tribeca Grand Hotel, where he ate his first meal of the day,
a box of popcorn.
He had slept through a director’s brunch, missing a chance to chat
up Robert De Niro, and said that if he did not hustle he would miss
a filmmakers’ meet-and-greet on Vestry Street, and likely some wine
and cheese.
He checked his planner. After the meet-and-greet, he had penciled
in a party. The next day, a screening followed by another party.
Flipping the pages back a week, he marveled.
“All these parties,” he said. “I feel like a debutant.”
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The Tribeca Film Festival can be a whirlwind 10 days for any filmmaker
breezing from premieres to panel discussions to parties and, for a
lucky few, to meetings and negotiations with film distributors. For
first-timers like Bai, the festival can feel like a 10-day twister.
“I made time for myself to rest for like a week before it started”
he said. “It wasn’t enough.”
The celebration was a long time coming for Bai, whose full-length
feature, “Puzzlehead,” was in the festival’s New York, New York category.
The film, a tale of a love triangle between a man, a woman and an
android, is set in the future but was shot in Brooklyn “many moons
ago.”
Bai is reluctant to reveal his age or just how many moons ago he shot
the film. But it is clear that Stephen Galaida, the lead actor in
the film, who was on hand for the film’s world premier on April 24,
is not as young as he used to be.
“When I called a friend to tell her I had been accepted at the festival,”
Bai said, “she didn’t say congratulations, she just said, ‘What took
you so long?’”
Bai, who lives in Westchester, produced much of the project on his
own, from the first draft of dialogue to the film’s final color corrections,
with years of editing and re-editing in between. Days before his premiere,
he and a friend were still designing the promotional posters that
he printed at Kinko’s and the business cards that he would press into
the hands of producers, publicists, movie stars and other filmmakers.
“I must have met and talked to like 100 people,” he said. “And I actually
remember 50 or 60 of their names.”
As the days blurred together, Bai poked his head into screenings—catching
“10 minutes of 15 films”—while dashing from one event to another,
“late every time,” he said. He even missed the first 30 minutes of
the festival’s awards ceremony.
“Even if I would have won, I wasn’t there to accept the award,” he
said.
Finally, as he awaited a bellhop to come for his bags on April 30,
Bai wondered what it all meant.
“Do I feel like I’ve arrived as a filmmaker?” he said. “I don’t know.
Maybe I will after I get home and have some time to think about it.”
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