The 2014 Tribeca Film Festival runs from April 16th through 27th. Since the massive fest can be a bit of an overwhelming task to tackle, we've attempted to streamline it for you below. All the hyperlinks direct you to screening times and ticketing information, which mostly don't go on sale until TFF actually starts on the 14th, but all that data (plus info on ticket packages) can be found here.
(Image Courtesy of the Tribeca Film Festival)
What is the Tribeca Film Festival?
Started in 2002 by Tribeca Production founders Robert de Niro and Jane Rosenthal, TFF was conceived in part as a cultural response to the attacks of 9/11. A devastated lower Manhattan area in Tribeca needed a boost, and TFF was designed to bring much needed revitalization and positive publicity. From an interview with the New York Times in the festival's first year:
What the festival is mostly about is Lower Manhattan, Ms. Rosenthal said: getting people there, proving it is still vital, celebrating the creative (and consumer and culinary) goods it has to offer. ''The impetus for us to move this quickly and put together this group came together because of our mission to do something for our neighborhood."
During the first year, films were invited by the organizers and there was no submission process, which led to something of an imbalance, but every year since 2002 has seen the submissions grow, from 2,400 in 2003 to this year's staggering 6,117. I mean, Star Wars: Episode II—Attack of the Clones premiered at the first TFF in '02, which is insane.
Anyways, TFF today is a beast. In 2010, it was brought under the auspices of Tribeca Enterprises, making the move to a full-time, year-round business marked by the annual film festival. It's very corporate, heavily-sponsored, and sometimes silly, but it happens in New York City, and is in general much more publicly accessible than nearly all other big-name film festivals.
What are the marquees this year?
This year, the festival is opening with the Nas documentary Time is Illmatic and will close with John Carney's Begin Again, starring Kiera Knightley, Mark Ruffalo, and Adam Levine. Michael Rapaport's Knicks documentary When The Garden Was Eden opens the parallel Tribeca/ESPN Sports Film Festival. Both the former and the latter look great.
Why are there so many different categories? WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?
Well, it's just a way to organize the staggering amount of films that TFF shows each year. We're talking about 167 directors (feature and short) and just as many films. That said, not all of the submissions are selected for competition, and that is a big focus of each year's festival. The main sections are the Spotlight Series (the big-name non-competition flicks), and the World Narrative and World Documentary Competitions for feature-length films.
Other categories include the Shorts Competitions (for both narrative and documentary), the Viewpoints section (dedicated to "launching fresh voices and embracing risky, utterly original storytelling"), the Midnight series (films selected in the midnight movie tradition), Storyscapes (a "multi-platform transmedia program"), and the Special Screenings section, which is a kind of repository of cool films, from Bronies to Hurricane Sandy.
Along with the movies, though, TFF has branched off into a few other new territories, including the Tribeca Talks series (with directors and industry professionals), After The Movie events, and their joint venture with ESPN, the Sports Film Festival, and their Innovation Week program which, much like SXSW, focuses on "closing the gap between the creative and tech worlds." More on that stuff later.
There are 12 films in competition for a handful of awards—Best Narrative Feature, Best New Narrative Director, Best Actor and Actress, Best Screenplay, and Best Cinematography—in a slate that "focuses on that ways that unique and powerful journeys of self-discovery resonate across international lines."
The Rory Culkin starring Gabriel opens the competition, which is emphatically not 2007's Underworld knockoff Gabriel, about the eponymous archangel.
Ones to watch for include Five Star, an East New York set film about a member of the Bloods, the Italian drama Human Capital, the teenage portrait Güeros set in Mexico City, first-time director Tinatin Kajrishvili's portrait of Georgian women Brides and the dark comedy about female Israeli soliders Zero Motivation.
Documentaries are generally much easier to estimate—one is either interested in the subject matter or not—and there is a great slate in competition at TFF. The Harry Dean Stanton-narrated doc about the cowboys of Montana’s Fishtail Basin Ranch called Fishtail, and Mala Mala explores the transgender community in Puerto Rico.
Other standouts include portrait of Africa's oldest natural park Virunga, the Kathputli colony in Dehli's fight for survival in Tomorrow We Disappear and a peek inside the first Dior Haute Couture Collection by Artistic Director Raf Simons in Dior and I.
In Order of Disappearance follows Stellan Skarsgaard in a Snatch-esque thriller as his character Nils investigates the death of his son and becomes involved in a Serbian gang war and James Franco's James Franco Produced Palo Alto, is adapted from a collection of stories by James Franco and stars Emma Roberts and James Franco.
Jesse Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning, and Peter Sarsgaard star as environmental activitsts plotting to blow up a dam in Night Moves, Paul Haggis' Third Person is a modern love drama with a big name ensemble cast including James Franco, Mila Kunis, Liam Neeson, Olivia Wilde, and Adrien Brody that takes place in three stories set in Rome, Paris, and New York, and, finally, Roman Polanski's returns to directing in his adaptation of David Ives' play Venus In Fur, which is itself an adaptation of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's novel of the same name. We derive the term masochism from Sacher-Masoch, so you can guess what he was into!
Other noteworthy films: Courtney Cox debuts behind the camera directing Seann William Scott for Just Before I Let Go, Alfred Molina and John Lithgow are about to get married in New York in Love Is Strange, Joss Whedon penned the romantic comedy In Your Eyes, a documentary on Alice Cooper, the documentary In Search of General Tso, another doc called Silenced on the eight individuals charged under the Espionage Act during President Obama's time on office, and John Favreau's most certainly bad new film Chef. Whew.
The marquee is 6, a documentary-in-progress from the team behind The Cover, about mass extinction, endangered species and the animal black market.
The one-size fits all Special Screenings section has some gems, including the documentary on Bronies A Brony Tale, an Allen Iverson documentary, a short doc on Argentinean soccer legend Diego Maradona, and the Hurricane Sandy doc This Time Next Year. Oh, and Journey To The West, about the pilgrimage of a Buddhist monk!
Viewpoints
And finally, in the last section of note, Viewpoints has a great looking lineup. The Mark Landis documentary Art and Craft, the Northern China drama and big winner at the Berlin Film Festival Black Coal, Thin Ice, and the documentary Famous Nathan about Coney Island's own Nathan's Hot Dogs.
Brooklyn's own Onur Tukel's Summer of Blood opens the Viewpoints program with his vampire hipster early mid-life crisis romp with Girls star Alex Karpovsky!
The Extra Stuff
The After The Movie presentations are probably the best this year, with conversations between Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield, Kevin Spacey, Michael Douglas, Barney Frank and Alec Baldwin.
The highlights from The Future of Film chats are "All The News That's Fit To Shoot, Print, Or Tweet" with Upworthy Co-Founder Eli Pariser and Vice CEO Shane Smith, what will certainly be a how-to-write-a-coked-up-morality-tale with Aaron Sorkin, a talk with Nate Silver along with The Wire's David Simon and writer Beau Willimon from House of Cards, and finally Brian Cranston and The Sopranos' Terence Winter talk about psychopathic killers.
There are two Tribeca Director Talks: Ron Howard with Brian Williams and Lee Daniels with Robin Roberts. The Industry Talks are here, and lastly, don't forget about the free drive-in movies.
One last thing: available starting April 14th, you can reserve free tickets to all screenings on Friday, April 25th!
