Covering the recently completed Tribeca Film Festival is like a marathon sprint, with screenings all day and pieces to crank out well into the night (if you’re doing it right). Except for the final day of award winning screenings, very little of the festival was actually seen in the Tribeca neighborhood proper (the Triangle Below Canal Street). However, since it was founded to revitalize Lower Manhattan in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attack, the festival has become one of the most important North American film fests, rivaling or perhaps even surpassing Sundance and Toronto. Like any festival of its size, there were a lot of hidden gems and a fair amount of dross to sift through.
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The screening of Mohammad Rasoulof’s The White Meadow should have been the media focus of the festival. Though Rasoulof’s himself is no stranger to Iran’s dungeons, the film’s editor, Jafar Panahi, a filmmaker in his own right, is still being held incommunicado in Evin Prison. Thanks to the tenacious efforts of BH’s own John Simpson, readers should be well versed in Panahi’s story by now. While not exactly the Tribeca lead for most outlets, the critical reaction was quite positive and deservedly so.
Given the prevalence of tears and suffering in the archetypal Meadows, it is hard not to read additional meaning into its story. Frankly though, Rasoulof wisely keeps the political allegory largely obscure. Still, there seem to be clear parallels between the bad karma the islander characters are suffering and the sins of the Islamic Revolutionary government. Totally absorbing despite its unhurried pace, Meadows is a testament to the filmmaking talents of director Rasoulof and editor Panahi. Resisting lazy classifications, Meadows was a clear highlight of Tribeca.
Presenting the New York City premiere of Madeleine Sackler’s charter school documentary The Lottery followed by a post-screening “Tribeca Talks” panel discussion with the film’s principle figures was somewhat bold programming choice for the fest. Though images of the big “O” are ubiquitous at the Harlem Success Academies and the “V” word (voucher) is scrupulously avoided, the film clearly assigns the lion’s share of the blame for the deplorable state of New York City’s public schools to the UFT, the local teachers’ union.
Much to the embarrassment of the union and local administrators, over five thousand parents attended a legally mandated lottery to enroll their children in Harlem Success Academies, a series of charter schools founded by a moderate Democratic former city council member who earned the union’s enmity for holding open hearings on the teacher contract. The Lottery effectively tells their poignant stories.
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Other highlights included Josh Appignanesi’s The Infidel, a surprisingly bold comedy about a British-Pakistani Muslim who is shocked to discover he was actually adopted and his birth name was the decidedly un-Muslim Solly Shimshillewitz. Deborah Scranton’s documentary Earth Made of Glass forthrightly examines allegations of collusion between Mitterand’s socialist government and the ruling Hutus in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, while also following one Rwandan’s search for his father’s murderer. Though not explicitly political, Park Chan-ok’s independent Korean film Paju intriguingly posited deep-seated psychological links between a major character’s serial activism and his lingering guilt for a tragic accident caused by his negligence. Though not for all tastes, it deserves an art-house life after the festival.
Among the mixed-bag films at Tribeca this year, Thorkell Hardarson and Örn Marino Arnason’s Feathered Cocaine was arguably the most mixed. Alan Howell Parrott, an American Sikh convert, introduced falconry to the Middle East, much to his eternal regret. Though falcon populations had held stable for centuries of falconry practice, Persian Gulf smuggling now threatens the noble birds with extinction, transplanting them to inhospitable climates and polluting their gene pool with designer hybrids.
Parrott’s revelations regarding falcon smuggling are quite eye-opening. However, the film badly mishandles his more controversial allegations. Parrott claims Osama bin Laden, an avid falconer, is actually ensconced in Iran, where he can be tracked by the transponders attached to his birds. Supposedly, Parrott even has the frequencies, but when he tried to pass along his intel to the Bush administration, they could not be bothered. Who did he try to contact? Richard Clarke at the State Department and Michael Scheuer at the C.I.A., two of the media’s favorite Bush-turncoats, both of whom we are told, declined to participate in the film. Not understanding or identifying such important political distinctions raise fundamental credibility issues for the entire film, as does their rather muffled admission that the Obama administration has also ignored Parrott’s overtures.
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While also middling, Ashley Horner’s brilliantlove is at least watchable, but largely wastes a potentially clever premise, in which a ne’er do well becomes the toast of the “erotic” fine art world, when an important collector discovers the nude snapshots of his girlfriend he drunkenly left behind in the pub. The lead actress, Nancy Trotter Landry, is also quite fit, which is fortunate, since she spends most of the film naked.
Jeff Reichert’s Gerrymandering was also pretty naked in its overt partisanship, notwithstanding occasional fig-leaves of bipartisanship (like a three second expository sound bite from John Fund). Throughout the film, he claims gerrymandering is practiced by both parties, but only presents Democrat politicians as the victims. His central case study was the 2003 Texas redistricting plan, controversial because it redrew the congressional map mid-decade. Reichert declines to inform viewers that the legislature and governor had deadlocked on redistricting immediately following the 2000 census and the lines at the time had been drawn by a panel of judges. While that might be a highly debatable impetus for revisiting reapportionment, it is legitimate context Reichert evidently has no interest in providing.
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As cinema, Gerrymandering is pretty dull, using a California ballot initiative as its narrative arc. Again, it illustrates Reichert’s tone-deafness when he emphasizes Proposition 11’s “broad base of support” by identifying Common Cause and the AARP. Yes, Governor Schwarzenegger was a strong proponent of the measure, but that is not likely to cut much ice with conservatives, or Republicans, or independents, or at this point, even moderate Democrats. Not that Gerrymandering is really looking to build up the governor. It is clearly far more preoccupied with demonizing Tom DeLay.
Though Thomas Ikimi’s Legacy has the novelty of a conservative Republican African American senator from the state of New York as a major character, it was by far the most disappointing collection of clichés at Tribeca. Essentially, either the recently repatriated Special Forces protagonist is a delusional psychopath or his brother, the senator, is irredeemably evil and corrupt. Not to drop spoilers, but those who guess both are true will not be particularly surprised by the film.
Of course, there were many thoroughly entertaining Tribeca selections that did not address politics at all, including a wonderfully eccentric Serge Gainsbourg bio-film. It is an important event beyond New York, because a number of films will parlay their Tribeca buzz into distribution deals. As a final note, I hereby apologize to everyone who emailed me during the show that I’m only now getting back to, forty-some screenings later.
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