The Tribeca Festival will launch its 24th edition Wednesday night with a brighter spotlight on shorts and more music documentaries then ever dotting its characteristically eclectic slate, and amid growing financial challenges for arts and entertainment.
World premieres like Tow by Stephanie Laing with Rose Byrne, Octavia Spencer and Demi Lovato, Everything’s Going To Be Great by Jon S. Baird starring Allison Janney and Bryan Cranston, Michael Weithorn’s The Best You Can with Kyra Sedgwick and Kevin Bacon, and Jim Sheridan and David Merriman’s Re-Creation with Vickey Krieps join animated psychedelic horror Dog of God from Latvia — the land of Flow. The lineup is heavy on directorial debuts with Kites from Brazil’s Walter-Thompson Hernández set in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, The Scout by Paula Andrea González-Nasser about a location scout in NYC, Westhhampton by Christian Nilsson and Melody Roscher’s Bird In Hand.
It’s a big slate with 118 features. Some films have premiered elsewhere like Paul Andrew Williams’ Dragonfly out of TIFF starring Andrea Riseborough and Brenda Blethyn.
The fest opens tonight with Susan Lacy’s Billy Joel: And So It Goes as the artist and Madison Square Garden mainstay has been in the news, sadly, with a brain disorder diagnosis. He won’t be attending the world premiere of the HBO doc at the Beacon Theater, but producer Tom Hanks will.
“Opening with a music doc has become kind of a tradition for us, and when we found out this one existed, it felt like we couldn’t get a more perfect one for us. We invited it for opening night quite early, and it ended up being something of a bellwether for what is a strong year for music docs,” said Cara Cusumano, Tribeca Festival director and SVP Programming.
“I think the word is kind of out with the artists that we do a good job with live performance and giving them that experience. So we have more than we’ve ever done this year,” she said. Many screenings are followed by live mini-concerts. Counting Crows and Culture Club, Billy Idol, Becky G and Eddie Vedder will perform after their films world premiere. Members of Metallica, Depeche Mode, Wizkid and Ty Dolla$ign will stick around for talks. Miley Cyrus is world premiering Something Beautiful, a visual album. There are a handful of projects by musicians like One Spoon of Chocolate written and directed by Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA.
Cusumano describes the fest as having a “diverse sensibility that encompasses traditional arthouse cinema, international films, documentaries, as well as some more pop fare.” There’s no formal market and sales take more time than they used to, but “we ultimately see pretty comparable numbers of films ultimately finding distribution as we always did.”
Tribeca has always been a double-sided coin: a community event and a film festival. “Anybody can come to our festival. We do have an industry focus, but it’s always been about the audiences. It was started after 9/11 to bring people downtown, to bring audiences together. And we are about bringing the New York City, tristate area and global audience to Tribeca,” said Jane Rosenthal, co-founder with Robert De Niro of the fest’s parent Tribeca Enterprises.
The festival moved from April to June in part to cater to its audience with great summer weather even as some industry players griped at having it so close to Cannes. “The biggest adjustment from April to June is the relative positioning to Cannes and the pool of films you are looking at shifts from those finishing and launching in the top of the year to those finishing in the middle of the year,” said Cusumano.
It’s debuting DreamWorks Animation’s How to Train Your Dragon on June 11 the day before it opens in theaters.
And popular demand, as well as industry imperatives, also led to a lot of tenderness being lavished on short films this year with a new, dedicated screening room. “Shorts was really growing on its own, organically. We were turning away the biggest rush lines last year from our shorts programs. And, at the same time, that’s where we’ve seen the biggest growth in our submissions. So, if the filmmakers are there and the audience is there, the question becomes how can we do more?” said Cusumano.
“You look at who’s come out of the festival, whether it was Damien Chazelle with Guy and Madeline Sitting on a Park Bench, or Jon Chu, or Ryan Coogler. It’s a great way to discover new filmmakers,” said Rosenthal. “Whoopi Goldberg also does her curated animated pieces there. And it’s sort of an obvious idea. I wish we had done it before.” This year, Ti West directs a Kid Cudi music video. Slick Rick stars with Idris Elba in a half-hour visual album Victory.
Another new addition to the fest is the Storytelling Summit, days of programming with practical talks, mixers and access to screenings for a lower-priced badge.
“We were thinking about those 13,000 people who submit new work,” says Cusumano. “They are filmmakers. They could benefit tangibly from this festival, yet we’re only inviting 100 of them. We hear about these amazing experiences our filmmakers have coming through the festival, the people they meet and the networking and the opportunities it gave them. How can we make that something that a wider swath of creatives can have access to?”
The Summit and the new Shorts Theater are both meant “to support creatives their projects, in their careers, and at a difficult time in the industry when the traditional infrastructure is very challenged,” she said.
The idea is to expand festival’s value proposition for the broader industry and add a “deeper talent discovery aspect of what we do” in addition to buying and selling completed films.
Arts funding is an ongoing issue and it’s becoming dire as the Trump administration takes a scalpel to the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanitie. Deadline has looked at the impact of that on documentary filmmakers as well as on festivals.
“It’s always hard to get funding for the arts. And you can kind of tell what a community, what a society, is, by how they treat their artists,” says Rosenthal.
De Niro, her close colleague for decades, has been one of Donald Trump’s most outspoken critics, recently calling him “America’s philistine president” at a speech in Cannes where he was awarded an honorary Palme d’Or.
“People have to speak up,” he reiterated to Deadline. “They can’t be afraid. Even if you’re afraid, you’ve got to speak up. It will only get worse if you don’t, you’ve got to face it. People have to face it. It will affect everybody eventually if they don’t. There’s no easy way out. You’ve just got to stand up and say, ‘F*ck it. You are not going to ruin this country. You’re not going to ruin us. You’re going to not ruin what this country was founded on, what it’s about. It will not happen.’ And people have to stand up, it’s just that simple … You have to push back.”
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