Blessed By Fire

The fifth annual Tribeca Film Festival closed up shop this past weekend with an awards ceremony at the Golden Bridge Restaurant in Chinatown. In the International Narrative Competition, the $25,000 Founders Award for Best Narrative Feature went to Argentinean director Tristán Bauer's war memoir, Blessed By Fire. Marwan Hamed picked up $25,000 and the Best New Filmmaker prize for his epic-length Egyptian melodrama, The Yacoubian Building. Jürgen Vogel's unassailably intense performance as a rapist in recovery won The Free Will star the much-deserved Best Actor award, with a special mention to The Yacoubian Building's Adel Imam. Also receiving an honorable shout-out was the Czech ensemble cast of Holiday Makers, whose Eva Holubová nabbed the Best Actress prize. If you're curious to put names with these subjective decisions, the International Narrative Competition was juried by directors Edward Burns (The Brothers McMullen), Terry George (Hotel Rwanda), Trudie Styler (Boys from Brazil), and Melvin Van Peebles (Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song); actors Josh Lucas (Poseidon) and Kelly Lynch (Drugstore Cowboy); and novelist Antonio Skármeta (Il Postino).

The War Tapes

PREVIOUS UPDATE Update #10: May 5, 2006 Featuring Men At Work, Hanging Gardens and The Road to Guantanamo.

The International Documentary Feature Competition didn't yield many surprises, with Deborah Scranton's well-liked The War Tapes (edited from footage by U.S. soldiers in Iraq who were given digital video cameras) winning Best Documentary and $15,000. Turkish director Pelin Esmer received the Best New Documentary Filmmaker award and $25,000 for The Play, about nine village women staging a theatrical production based on their lives. A $25,000 Special Jury Prize went to the Netherlands' Aliona van der Horst and Maasja Ooms for their Voices of Bam, which listens to the survivors of 2003's devasting Iranian earthquake. The International Documentary Feature Competition was juried by doc mavericks Ken Burns (The Civil War), Robert Drew (Primary), Marc Levin (Protocols of Zion), Rory Kennedy (Pandemic: Facing AIDS) and Oren Jacoby (Sister Rose's Passion); plus the one-and-only Whoopi Goldberg (The Color Purple).

The Free Will

After seeing exactly 50 features, this exhausted critic is more than ready to move onward. I feel fortunate to have discovered 29 better-than-average films (and one panel discussion) worth spotlighting on a menu of over two hundred films. Perhaps I chose my screenings wisely, because as friends and peers share their thoughts on the scene, there's a mutual frustration and disappointment hanging in the air. For all the national attention the 2006 fest received, Tribeca is in dire need of renovations if it expects to be relevant in years to come.

9/11 is a good place to start. We know that the original festival intended to bring bodies and business back near the gaping wound in Lower Manhattan. Now the festival has spread like an unruly amoeba all over the city, with events stretching all the way to 68th Street on the Upper West Side. What's next, the Tribeca Film Festival in Brooklyn? Long Island? To associate with the martyrdom of a "healing festival" and not keep it within the geography that needs healing is insincere at best. Worse than that, the sprawl made way for major miscommunications, so that multiplexes working with the fest weren't always letting audiences in on time, screenings were postponed or rescheduled without notice, and staff wasn't made aware of press protocols.

Tom Cruise and Laurence Fishburne at the New York Mission: Impossible III premiere on May 3, 2006. Photo by Jennifer Cooper.

Before Tribeca can be centralized downtown where it belongs, though, the screening schedule needs to be streamlined. This year's unnecessarily bloated lineup unleashed some real stinkers. Too many selections were flat-out amateurish and unworthy of moviegoers' hard-earned dough. Perhaps if this year's 175-or-so features were shaved down to its best half, there might be more opportunities for the cream of the crop to be seen and buzz to be grown. The only hype heard was for scenester events like Tom Cruise's vehicular Mission: Impossible III tour and the opening-night gala of United 93. Even when it came to diversity, the programming was so weighted with Middle Eastern issues that little else was represented fairly. The state of the American indie is in serious trouble this year if Tribeca's picks are a fair indication, and the exciting new waves of East Asian cinema were neglected here. Higher-quality indies and foreign titles would help Tribeca resolve its identity crisis, shaping itself more as a distribution market like Sundance or Toronto.

One festival insider working a red carpet premiere told me that out of 900 available seats, over 200 had been reserved by the filmmakers alone, and that's before Amex cardholders, Tribeca staff, and other VIPs are given their pick of the best seats (many of which stayed empty through the films, while paying ticketholders sat on the sidelines). Why would anyone want to attend a festival where you can't feel like part of a film-loving community if you aren't accepted behind the velvet rope? And why would Abel Ferrara's Mary (one of my most anticipated films of the year) only show once at a "secret screening" sponsored by MySpace, especially when it proved to be better than 90% of what screened in competition? It's like high school lunchroom elitism all over again.

I don't, however, think the Tribeca experience was a waste of time. As I mentioned, I'm thankful for the good films I was able to catch. The potential and sponsorship dollars are there, so let's give them a year to figure out what works and what doesn't. Until then, I leave you with my Top 5 Faves from the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival:

1. The Free Will (Der Freie Wille)
2. The Road to Guantanamo
3. Lunacy (Sílení)
4. Rock the Bells
5. The Case of the Grinning Cat (Chats Perchés)