Tribeca Film Festival 2016: After 15 years, Robert De Niro's festival has finally hit its groove

Andy Link started crying at a British airport desk when he was informed that he would not be allowed to fly to New York for the Tribeca Film Festival. This made a dramatic change from the years gone past when people started crying because they had decided to attend the film festival created by Robert De Niro, which became known as a showpiece for terrible American fare with a star named attached.

But after four years in charge, French Artistic Director Frederick Boyer seems to have hit upon a formula that works for the 15-year-old festival, mixing a selection of films with an impressive list of talks and adding new sections bursting with virtual reality and television fare. Another innovation this year that worked was copying the Sundance formula of having a separate US narrative and international competition.

So it turns out that Link was right to cry.

Link is better known by his alias, AK47, the self-proclaimed leader of the underground global network of arto-politkal activists, calling themselves Art Kieda. He is also a former porn star who purportedly stole a Banksy statute called The Drinker, which started a ten-year feud with the artist. The story is recounted in the mockumentary The Banksy Job, directed by Ian Roderick Gray and Dylan Harvey, a purposely low-grade affair that suffers under the daft baboon mannerism of AK47, who is not nearly engaging or savvy enough to sustain a feature length film.

The weeks before Tribeca started was dominated by the decision to select and then withdraw Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe, the controversial documentary directed by struck-off British doctor Andrew Wakefield about his controversial and discredited claims linking autism to the MMR vaccine. Despite the Tribeca ban, anyone in New York could see the film as The Angelika Film Centre immediately capitalised on the brouhaha to release the film.

And that’s part of the trouble that a festival in any major city from New York to London faces, that the cinematic options in the city are so great that a film festival becomes just another part of the landscape, rather than the horizon it should be. In smaller cities the festival takes over the town, with many of the townsfolk knowing that this may be their only chance to watch some films, whereas in New York, there’s a presumption that the films will eventually have a run in the city.

open image in gallery

The big problem with such an attitude is that it fails to acknowledge that the joy of film festivals is more than about just seeing movies. Apart from Cannes, where Artistic Director Thierry Fremaux confirmed that he is not looking to add a television strand, most festivals try to incorporate what is happening on the big and small screen. There is also a growing trend to incorporate the latest innovations in virtual reality and Tribeca was no exception.

Emmanuel Lubezki, the first cinematographer to win three Oscars in a row, for Gravity, Birdman and The Revenant was in the Virtual Arcade looking at the latest innovations. It will be intriguing to see if the man known as El Chivo is looking to make a virtual reality film.

Lubezki was also in town to chat with Gravity director Alfonso Cuaron at one of the many talks that Tribeca hosted. In many ways the talks are the standout element of the festival. JJ Abrams almost broke the Internet when he commented to Chris Rock that Star Wars protagonist Rey’s parents were not in Episode VII, a statement he later backtracked on. Josh Whedon lamented to Mark Ruffalo that making two Avengers films exhausted him and had him “beaten down.” This was followed by British director Andrea Arnold talking down her Wuthering Heights adaptation. New York was turning into one big fat public confessional.

As for the films themselves, the standouts were the documentaries. The Daily Show producer Sara Taksler made an engrossing documentary about “Egypt’s Jon Stewart” Bassem Youssef, called Tickling Giants. It follows Youssef’s journey from surgeon to Youtube star and then Egypt’s most popular political satirist, poking fun at the regime changes taking place in Cairo, from the overthrow of Hosni Mobarak to the election of the Muslim brotherhood and then the military coup of March 2014. Youssef has to flee Egypt, and he admitted that watching the documentary was a difficult affair as it included scenes of his father, whose recent funeral he was unable to attend. Taksler does a good job of mixing comedy, with drama while cranking up the tension.

open image in gallery

Also in the documentary competition was Bombay Beach director Alma Har’el’s new film LoveTrue, which looks at what love is... As has become her habit, Har’el’s abilities as a cinematographer give the film a poetic quality, when so many other documentarians would have opted for melodrama.

Football fans, especially those from the blue half of Manchester, will be fascinated by Justin Webster’s Win! A behind-the-scenes look at the creation of Manchester City’s sister club New York City. Webster looks at how financial restrictions and salary caps on wages ensure that soccer cannot burst through the glass ceiling to become competition for American Football, baseball and basketball.

As for narrative films, the British interest was sated by Jodie Whitaker’s excellent performance as a woman who moves back into her mother’s home in Rachel Tunnard’s Adult Life Skills. It was a strong festival for female directors, with a personal favourite being Ingrid Jungerman’s Women Who Kill, a lesbian riff on Woody Allen’s Manhattan Murder Mysteries.

No film festival is complete these days without the appearance of James Franco. He was in two films, King Cobra and The Fixer. At the time of writing I had only seen The Fixer in which he plays a red neck American. The film has an interesting central premise, in that it shows an Afghanistani, who comes to America and reports on the strange behaviour of the local citizens. It’s an interesting twisting of the situation from director Ian Olds.

Stand-up comedian Demetri Martin won a Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Festival in 2003. The New York comic has always had a way with whimsy and its spread all over his directorial debut Dean, which sees him star as the eponymous lead, who acts out while mourning the death of his mother. Kevin Kline play’s his dad, in a film that wallows for too long in it’s own sorrow.

Also worth looking out for is the portmanteaux film Madly, made up of short films exploring Love. The eclectic list of directors includes Mia Wasikowska, Sebastian Silva, Anurag Kashyap, Sion Sono, Gael Garcia Bernal and Natasha Khan, a.k.a Bat For Lashes.

Another surprise was Elvis and Nixon, in which director Liza Johnson imagines a scenario where Elvis Presley requests a meeting with President Nixon, so that he can spy for the government. Michael Shannon as Elvis and Kevin Spacey as Nixon put in smart, unusual performances.

So it seems that aged 15, rather than becoming a reckless teenager, Tribeca has begun to find its groove.

@Aftabamon