Introduction
From June 5th to 16th this year, downtown Manhattan hosted the 23rd annual Tribeca Festival, which brought film, art, episodic content, audio storytelling, games, talks, and interactive installations to the historic district.
Founded in 2002 by Jane Rosenthal, Craig Hatkoff, and Robert De Niro, the festival intends to bring vitality back to the Lower Manhattan neighborhood after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center buried it in rubble and heartache. The Festival now is renowned as one of the premiere East Coast North American festivals with this year’s offering featuring 114 feature-length narrative and documentary films.
While that’s certainly a daunting number, I managed to watch a (personal) record thirteen feature-length films, four shorts, and the premiere episode of a proposed sitcom. I was able to squeeze in interviews with filmmakers of 1-800-ON-HER-OWN, Some Rain Must Fall, All My Friends Are Dead, Darkest Miriam, the episodic Yanqui, and The Whitest Kids U’ Know, who brought the animated feature Mars to the program.
I also attended carpets to chat with the cast of Group Therapy, Treasure, and Between the Temples and caught the director and writer of Bang Bang at a post-screening Q&A. All told I was very busy, delightfully so, and as I finally have a moment I’d love to share with you my impressions of the many sights I beheld.
1-800-ON-HER-OWN
Documentarian Dana Flor allows unprecedented access to 90s indie alternative rock icon Ani DiFranco, who blazed trails for women, folk artists, DIY punk rockers, and free-thinkers of a generation. Coming perhaps twenty or thirty years too late, the distance allows Flor to shine a light on a revolutionary whose first fight is behind her while new obstacles, all at once personal, political, and global, crop up with alarming frequency.
A story of a pioneer who did it on her own and continues to do so, Ani’s story is wholly original yet timely and universal. As a woman struggling to remain relevant over the din of marginalization, she serves as a reminder that one voice of dissent can rally a nation.
Adult Best Friends
Adult Best Friends is a hilarious story of arrested development, and the people who care enough to sit beside us as we refuse to grow up, and those who pull us kicking and screaming into the inevitable now. Co-produced, co-written, co-directed, and co-starring Katie Corwin and Delaney Buffett (daughter of the late Jimmy Buffett) as characters Katie and Delaney, respectively, the story is a very personal one from these filmmakers.
Far and away the funniest offering I was able to screen this year, the film is at turns impactfully poignant and hilariously immature. I can only hope this is the first of many offerings from this duo and highly recommend this film to fans of Young Adult, Welcome to Me, and Bridesmaids.
All My Friends Are Dead (#AMFAD)
This slasher comedy opens with brash ads for the most popular music festival before surfing to archival coverage of a massacre that occurred at the festival some twenty years prior, then a voice-over about friendship and pure souls followed by a title card announcing that the events unfolding take place two years later. Confused? Disoriented? Overwhelmed? Good, then you’re ready for #AMFAD, the original title of All My Friends Are Dead.
This self-aware hybrid genre film knows you’ve seen all its ancestors and is keenly aware that you require something different, hyper-modern, and original. It achieves this in spades with a young, perpetually streaming cast that find themselves at an impromptu home share on their way to the festival and begin dying off, one by one, in inventive and gruesome ways that loosely correlate to the Seven Deadly Sins.
Starring Jade Pettyjohn (Seberg, ABC’s Big Sky) and YouTube sensation JoJo Siwa and directed by Saw alum Marcus Dunstan, the film boasts star power both in front of and behind the camera, daring to launch a fresh new voice in the hallowed ground of slasher films.
Bang Bang
Director Vincent Grashaw uses the embattled city of Detroit as his backdrop for this tale of retired, disgraced pugilist Bernard “Bang Bang” Rozyski who finds a second life as he trains his grandson to become a champion in the ring. Tim Blake Nelson delivers an awards-worthy performance as the surly former featherweight champ, battling his own demons and assigning blame on everyone and everything around him for the current state of his life.
The decaying city around him mirrors his own demise, he seeks new redemption in all the old ways, bemoaning his arrested development and scrambling back to a past that refuses to dance with the present.
Between the Temples
Noted New York auteur and Tribeca alum Nathan Silver returns with his ninth film Between the Temples, which tells the story of Ben Gottlieb (Jason Schwartzman), a cantor who is experiencing a crisis of faith after the untimely death of his beloved wife. He is awoken from his stupor by his old music teacher Carla Kessler (Carol Kane) re-enters his life as an adult bat mitzvah student. What follows is a cringe-inducing, hilarious, heartfelt, and culturally illuminating May-December romance comedy that proves, once again, that no one does it quite like Schwartzman.
As I screened this film when it came through Sundance, I was particularly excited to bend the ears of the cast and director at Tribeca this year. I learned that the film was shot with a treatment rather than a script so that the players had an idea of where a scene was meant to go and then were encouraged to explore the moments that propel us through our lives. This culminates in a dinner party scene that brings the viewer in at fork-level and finds us hilariously begging to be anywhere else, in the best way, of course.
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The cast of “Between the Temples” (2024). (L to R): Jason Schwartzman, Madeline Weinstein, Carol Kane, Matthew Shear, director Nathan Silver, and Robert Smigel. Photo courtesy of Eric McClanahan/Tribeca Festival.
Darkest Miriam
Director Naomi Jaye adapts Martha Baillie’s novel The Incident Report into a lyrical, poetic portrait of a woman struggling under the weight of her own grief while wrangling the city’s most vulnerable as a public librarian. At once personal and universal, Britt Lower soars as the titular Miriam who is finding handwritten messages in the library likening her to the daughter of Rigoletto, the titular hunchback from Verdi’s esteemed opera.
As she navigates this new mystery, she also finds romance with an immigrant taxi driver played by Tom Mercier. Both thespians deliver brave and vulnerable performances, bearing it all (both physically and emotionally) in a narrative that cannot help but move even the most stoic audience to empathy.
Proving that one can, in fact, judge a book by its cover, Naomi Jaye came across this property quite organically. “I found this book in a bookstore. I just loved the cover so I picked it up. It wasn’t, like, I knew about it or had heard about it. I didn’t know anything – I just saw it, picked it up, read the first page, and called the publisher. It was just one of those ‘love at first sight’ things.”
Don’t You Let Me Go
This film was one that made my shortlist immediately, just from the logline:
Adela stands among the crowd at Elena’s wake, feeling disconnected from the hushed voices and harsh fluorescent lights that don’t remind her of her best friend’s intrinsic joy. Emotionally drained, Adela goes to her car and what does she find waiting for her but a bus. Not an ordinary bus, a magic bus – a bus that takes her back in time to a magical weekend where a lively and funny Elena awaits her in a beach house, ready to binge detective novels and ride bicycles and dance the night away. Like nothing ever changed.
This film from Uruguay flirts with time and memory the same way the two flirt with us: we can struggle to hold on to flitting moments as they fade or we can hold moments in our hands like crystal flowers for hours on end. The core of the film is an unbreakable friendship between three disparate women and the strength they get from one another during a weekend which, without hindsight, would seem utterly pedestrian. The film won the Festival’s Nora Ephron Award.
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The Cast of “Group Therapy” (2024). (L to R): Neil Patrick Harris, Atsuko Okatsuka, Mike Birbiglia, Tig Notaro, London Hughes, and Gary Gulman. Photo courtesy of Eric McClanahan/Tribeca Festival.
Group Therapy
Neil Berkeley, whose previous documentary Gilbert chronicling the life and career of late comedian Gilbert Gottfried also premiered at Tribeca, returns with this eye-opening documentary featuring six comedians discussing the intersection of mental health and comedy in a conversation mediated by Neil Patrick Harris. If you’re confused about what he’s doing there, so is he, as he expresses at the start of the film.
Nonetheless, the comedians assembled to break down their barriers and share with one another, as well as a live audience, the struggles that compelled them to stand before strangers and make light of their anxieties.
Starring Harris, Mike Birbiglia, Nicole Byers, Gary Gulman, London Hughes, Tig Notaro, and Astuko Okatsuka, the film has as much laughter as it does heart. When I asked London Hughes if a film like this would be made in England, she immediately responded “It wouldn’t need to be made because we have free health care in England, which means if people are ill they can get the resources they need for free, so we wouldn’t need this. America: Get it together!”
Hunters on a White Field
This Swedish film from director and co-writer Sarah Gyllenstierna centers around a pair of experienced hunters bringing an officemate along for their (last) annual hunting trip at a brother’s cabin. After a few successful forays into the wilderness and nights of feast and drink, they awake one day to find all the creatures have vanished and the forest has fallen silent.
Unable to shelve their primal urges to establish dominion over their surroundings, they agree to hunt one another. It’s a damning indictment of masculinity, the need for conquest, and the grotesque games that spring forth from that need.
Rent Free
This comedy of errors follows Ben (Jacob Roberts) and Jordan (David Treviño) as two Gen Zers who find their plans to make it in New York City dashed by a hilarious indiscretion by the former. Left with no choice but to tuck tail and head back to their hometown of Austin, the two agree to try to go one full year “rent-free,” living off the kindness of friends as they save their pennies during twelve months of couch surfing.
Punctuated by illuminating real estate listings in the cities they frequent, the film is a buddy comedy that illuminates the struggles of the young generation in the ballooning housing economy that prices them out of their dreams while pushing them toward innovation. The leads give frustrating and endearing performances as their characters test the limits of their friendships with their temporary hosts as well as each other.
She Loved Blossoms More
This French/Greek mind bender finds three brothers experimenting with a time machine they’re constructing in a wardrobe with the intention of bringing their recently departed mother back into the world of the living. After a few promising false starts, such as sending a chicken’s head to another dimension while the body soldiers on, in our own, they desperately accelerate to human testing, shoving a visiting ingénue into the cabinet.
What emerges is a nightmare of body horror that offers cryptic words of encouragement, and none too soon, as the boys’ benefactor and father arrive pushing the timetable forward. Entering the fray themselves, the third act of this delirious experiment offers visuals unlike any I’d seen and is sure to delight aficionados of the strange and beautiful.
Some Rain Must Fall
Another must-see on my shortlist, Some Rain Must Fall pulled me in with its logline:
Cai (Best Performance in an International Narrative Feature winner Yu Aier) is a mother and housewife who thought having a family was everything. When she inadvertently injures the grandmother of one of her teen daughter’s less privileged teammates, her supposedly perfect life descends into a menacing chaos and she starts to question everything about who she is and what she wants.
Initially imagining this to be something akin to Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite and its themes on class, it turned out to be a far more minimal and personal portrait of Cai, who discovers ast the veneer of her curated life peels back that beneath it lies a woman who is unsure. Unsure of her position, her desires, her goals, or even her own feelings.
She flails as she tries to find the key to unlocking her passion; to feel something, anything. She examines her life through the lens of the generations around her, and within the confines of the boxes she’s placed herself and everyone else in. Qiu Yang directs from his own script, and the photography won the Festival’s Best Cinematography in an International Narrative Feature, the film has been hailed as creating a “searing visual tension as a cinematic reinforcement of suffering.“
The Weekend
This Nigerian thriller is a take on the classic “What’s wrong with the In-Laws?” trope that offers shrieks and chills in equal measure. Evocative of Jordan Peele’s Get Out, the film follows Nikya (Uzoamaka Anuinoh), an orphan who is looking forward to starting her own family with fiance Luke (Bucci Franklin), an island of a man who has avoided his own family for more than a decade.
After she issues an ultimatum, he reluctantly agrees to take her to his former home to meet the parents for a weekend, which just so happens to fall on their anniversary. A feast is held, the whole family is present, and spirits are high. However, the cracks begin to show almost immediately, and by the time it’s too late, the weekend has tumbled hopelessly into a bloody chaos that will leave everyone irreparably changed.
Keep your eyes peeled as these films make their way from the festival circuit into your theaters and homes, and a big thank you to Tribeca Productions and all the cast, creators, crew, and publicists who allowed me to enjoy this year’s stellar offerings.
