Tribeca Film Festival, April 15-26: The Trib's Annual Preview

The Tribeca Film Festival features the world premiere of "Gored," a documentary about Antonio Barrera, known as "the most gored bullfighter in history."

More than 200 films over 12 days and, for us lucky filmgoers, a thousand and one vicarious experiences that, once again, carry us away psychically, spiritually and geographically.

And this year, for the first time since the festival’s early days, many of those movies can be seen below Canal Street.

The Tribeca Film Festival, which had become a “Tribeca” event nearly in name only, is returning to its Downtown roots, with all 11 theaters of Battery Park City’s Regal Cinemas screening festival movies.

Spring Studios, the 150,000-square-foot creative production house at 50 Varick St. in Tribeca will serve as what the Festival is calling its “hub,” bringing filmmakers and audiences, together in numerous talks and panel discussions. Awards nights and other events will take place there as well. 

As always, the festival’s filmmakers offer a wealth of subjects among the narratives and docs, feature-length films and shorts, many of which you may have no other chance to see.

From the challenges of romance among autistic people in Matt Fuller’s moving documentary “Autism in Love,” to devotion of an entirely different kind in Erik Shirai’s “The Birth of Saké”;  from the violence of the Mexican drug war portrayed in Matthew Heineman’s “Cartel Land” to Pakistan and the training of children for jihad in “Among the Believers.” They’re all here.

So, too, are the surviving members of the Monty Python troupe, on hand for a celebration of the 40th anniversary of “Monty Python and The Holy Grail,” with screenings of other Python films (“Monty Python’s Life of Brian,” and “Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life”).  Premiering at the festival will be “Monty Python: The Meaning of Live,” a behind-the-scenes look at the making of a live show, followed by a Q&A with the Pythons themselves.

A schedule of all films and events is at tribecafilm.com.

FAMILY STREET FEST

CONVERSATIONS ABOUT FILM

TICKETS

From shady underworlds to seedy nightclubs to the Devil himself, the following foreign narratives are unafraid to go to dark places, such as middle school. That is the setting of BEING 14 (France), which plays like cinéma vérité while it tracks the challenging and changing lives of a young trio of friends during their final year of middle school. Similarly, NECKTIE YOUTH (Netherlands, South Africa) is presented in a documentary style (it’s even in black and white) and follows a day in the life of disaffected 20-somethings in suburban Johannesburg. But the day begins with a suicide and then gets worse. What unfolds is a story of innocence lost as the privileged kids are forced to finally reckon with real life in a race-torn city. A gang of teenage toughs and the trouble they get into are the subject of WE ARE YOUNG. WE ARE STRONG. From Germany, the film is based on a 1992 anti-immigrant riot in Rostock.

 

There is something rotten in BRIDGEND (Denmark). The dark tale is based on a true story of a depressed Welsh town where 79 teenagers have killed themselves since 2007. Documentary director Jeppe Ronde makes his first foray into narrative by telling the story through the eyes of a teenaged girl, freshly arrived and newly in love in a town haunted by tragedy. Will she make it out alive? THE SURVIVALIST (Northern Island, UK) is set in a post-apocalyptic landscape where the odds of living out the day depend on the number of people you share it with. Here, the struggle is against starvation as our hero, the farmer, must find ways to sustain himself and the newcomers to his land.

 

The landscape is far more lush in VIAJE (Costa Rica), the tale of a pair of young lovers who rendezvous in a forest, exploring nature and testing the boundaries of noncommittal love. VIRGIN MOUNTAIN (Iceland, Denmark) is not a destination but an unfortunate description of the hulking 40-something man at the center of a quirky tale that involves his family coaxing him to take dance lessons in hopes that he might step up his game.

 

Things are more complicated in SWORN VIRGIN (Albania, Germany, Italy, Kosovo, Switzerland), where a village woman in Northern Albania decides to live as a village man. That means taking an oath of lifelong virginity. But, as the film explores, life is long and the temptations far greater outside the village. In EL CINCO, from Argentina, we meet an aging and fiery soccer star who must adjust to life off the pitch where not all scores can be settled by feet and fists.

 

It is 1835 and a lawman and his son are on the trail of a runaway gypsy slave in AFERIM! (Romania). Though black and white, the film is a vivid look at Romanian culture and countryside. A jazz club owner’s debts have been called in by an underworld kingpin in WEDNESDAY 04:45 (Germany, Greece, Israel). What follows is the tense tale of a man desperate to protect his life and life’s work.

 

Business is also bad in STRANDED IN CANTON (Sweden, Denmark, China). It is another hybrid of documentary and narrative that follows the misfortunes of a fictional entrepreneur from the Congo who has arrived in China to sell his wares. SUNRISE (India, France) is a noirish film, set in the seedy nightclubs and back alleys of Mumbai, the most populous city in India, where a father pursues a shadowy figure who might be connected to his daughter’s disappearance.

 

Finally, as promised, the Devil comes to town in LUCIFER (Belgium, Mexico). In this telling, inspired by the Biblical story, he appears in his original form as a fallen angel. That Lucifer literally descends a ladder to appear and make mischief in a modern-day Mexican village makes it all the more strange a tale. Also odd is the director’s choice to frame the sinister proceedings through a camera of his own invention, the “Tondoscope.” Forget widescreen: the Devil delivers his lines in circle screen.
 

...AND DOMESTIC 

There are recognizable characters here—bad fathers, good friends, black sheep, the rascally but wise grandparent—but they’re richly rendered and put to good use in the following tales, many of which explore what it means to know and love them. In other words, what it means to be family.

From wry cartoonists, to a “Cannibal Cop,” to the most gored bullfighter in history, documentary offerings this year promise a slew of wild tales. In short, there are some real characters here. Consider the man behind the mask in ORION: THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING. Who is this guy who looks, and more important, sounds just like Elvis Presley? Fans still mourning Presley’s death are desperate to believe the mystery man is actually The King in disguise. The film explores the life and career of the performer who wore the mask, and however briefly, the crown. Then there is the guy who proclaims himself Pastor Crocodile, a savior for the destitute and drug-addicted youth from the streets of Mariupol, Ukraine. He comes in for his close-up in CROCODILE GENNADILY, but the portrait reveals that his vigilante methods may only lead to more violence. (T)ERROR is the tale of a counterterrorism informant for the FBI, never named, who is setting up one last sting. But the case is flimsy, maybe even fraudulent. This window into the cloak-and-dagger world of counterterrorism raises questions about ethics, privacy and politics. DREAM/KILLER is the story of the wrongful conviction of a young man for murder and a father’s decade-long quest to prove his son’s innocence. THOUGHT CRIMES is a look at the eye-opening case of “Cannibal Cop” NYPD officer Gilberto Valle, who was convicted and then acquitted of conspiring to kidnap, kill and eat his victims. The only evidence of Valle’s conspiracy was found in his online search queries and chat-room fantasizing. He might be crazy, the film posits, but is thinking crazy thoughts a crime?

From light and funny snacks to heavy and heartfelt appetizers, the following short films offer satisfying cinema in small portions. LIVE FAST, DRAW YOUNG is a comedic documentary sketch of a spunky 7-year-old rapper navigating the harsh world of hip hop with the help of his parents. WE LIVE THIS is a behind-the-scenes look at the lives of young subway performers, following four boys working the commuter crowd together.

 

It would have been easy to make fun of the subjects in AMERICAN RENAISSANCE, but instead the documentary is a kind and considered portrait of the people who have made Renaissance fairs a way of life. The life and career of Olympic gold medal-winning gymnast Nadia Comaneci, the first ever to score a perfect 10 in competition, is the subject of ETERNAL PRINCESS.

 

A pair of enemy soldiers become blood brothers for life in MY ENEMY, MY BROTHER, the true story of an Iranian child soldier who risked his life to save an Iraqi enemy during the Iraq–Iran war. Years later, the pair reunite and return to Iraq and Iran in search of survivors, including a missing wife, son and parents. A brother and sister are at odds in KINGDOM 

OF GARBAGE. The young landfill scavengers have angered the self-proclaimed King of Garbage and their livelihood is in danger.

 

Things are not what they seem in the narrative short, A MIGHTY NICE MAN, in which a young girl gets in a car with a “kind” stranger. THE GNOMIST is a true fairy tale. The documentary goes in search of the mysterious creator of the magical-seeming fairy homes—tiny doors installed in the hollows of trees—that have sprung up in a suburban forest to the delight of children and their parents. Then there are the shenanigans in MERRY XMAS. Here a mischievous father (Dick Van Dyke) calls his adult children to tell them that after 55 years of marriage, he and their mother are separating. The family is still growing in THE PARKER TRIBE. The sincere, funny narrative film is the tale of a family struggling to raise two children with disabilities while welcoming another to the tribe.

 

APHASIA is a science fiction story about the price of being perpetually plugged into the digital world and what happens to a population that cannot keep their phones out of their faces. The future is uniquely dystopian in FUTURE RELIC, the tale of archivist (James Franco) who sifts through the tools of an “ancient” civilization (telephones, TVs, a camera) discovered long after the planet has been largely destroyed.

 

From records to cassettes to CDs to MP3s, THE EVOLUTION OF A GEN-X MUSIC PURCHASER is a biopic about Zack and how the major moments of his life can be charted alongside the advancement of music technology.

 

Finally, there is LAST CALL. Culled from thousands of photographs of customers and tales only a bartender could tell, the film is a loving look back at the Terminal Bar.

 

COMEDIES 

 

Open with a joke. That’s time-tested advice the festival takes to heart this year with LIVE FROM NEW YORK!, a documentary retrospective of “Saturday Night Live” that explores the origin and evolution of the comic institution. The comedies that follow over the next 11 days of the festival are campy, corny, silly, wild, dirty and weird. Whatever it takes, as another piece of advice goes, leave ’em laughing.

 

DIRTY WEEKEND is a merry mystery that follows a businessman (Matthew Broderick) and his colleague (Alice Eve) in their search to piece together what happened one drunken night in Albuquerque. THE DRIFTLESS AREA is a dark comic adventure about a young man (Anton Yelchin} unwittingly drawn into a criminal caper when he falls for quirky Stella (Zooey Deschanel). THE OVERNIGHT begins, innocently enough, with a playdate, but descends into a lusty lark once the kids are put to bed and their parents (Judith Godreche, Jason Schwartzman, Taylor Schilling and Adam Scott) pair off. Meanwhile, SLEEPING WITH OTHER PEOPLE features a normally promiscuous pair (Jason Sudeikis, Alison Brie) who are convinced they can only make their budding relationship work if they don’t have sex—not with each other, anyway. Meanwhile, in SLOW LEARNERS, high school teachers (Adam Pally, Sarah Burns) are so comically inept at finding love as themselves that each sets out to be someone else over the summer. 

 

The setting is New England–quaint and the setup more traditional in TUMBLEDOWN, the tale of a young widow (Rebecca Hall) who falls for a writer (once again, Sudeikis, that cad) who comes calling in search of a story on her late husband, a folk singer. Then there is APPLESAUCE, a sort of horror comedy about a man (Onur Tukel) who has said too much during a radio interview. His confession sets off a chain of horrible, hilarious events for the people closest to him. 

 

The terrible teacher in TENURED has a maybe not-so-terrible plan to win his wife back by means of his fifth-graders and the school play. A high school student strikes up an unlikely friendship with his unlikely neighbor (Mickey Rourke), a former CIA assassin, in ASHBY. 

Things go badly in the dark comedy SCHERZO DIABOLICO (Mexico, USA), the tale of a mild-mannered accountant who kidnaps a young woman. Things are bad in a good way in RIFFTRAX LIVE: THE ROOM, a one-night-only live event that features the wisecracking trio from Mystery Science Theater 3000 cutting up during a screening of the cult classic THE ROOM. 

 

And now, for something completely different...MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL. The festival is screening the film, along with other Python films and a new documentary, in celebration of the 40th anniversary of the classic which remains funny after all these years. 

The festival promises the attendance of the surviving Python members (Eric Idle, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Michael Palin and Terry Jones) who, presumably, remain funny as well.