Tribeca Film Festival

Jessica Winter catches work by Chris Marker, Claude Chabrol and Jan Svankmajer at the New York film festival.

May 18 2006

Started in 2002 to rejuvenate lower Manhattan and showcase its film culture after the shock of the September 11 attacks, the Tribeca Film Festival (April 25-May 7) entered its fifth and arguably strongest year with a mass-meets-class strategy familiar from Cannes, Venice and Toronto.

Like these older fests, Tribeca uses multiplex behemoths as the flashy gift-wrapping for a less marketable arthouse bonanza, guaranteeing publicity for an event that’s largely a playground for the cineaste, not the celebrity hound.

This year, the brainchild of Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal led with unavoidably topical blockbusters: witness the weirdly au courant torture and sadism on display in 'Mission: Impossible III', the screaming chaos of 'Poseidon' (a lame action flick made shivery by its context here), and of course, the opening-night selection, 'United 93' (discussed here).

But Tribeca's true energies derive from the impressive documentary line-up and from the host of premieres by world-class filmmakers. Chris Marker's latest beguiling piece of urban psychogeography, the hour-long 'The Case of the Grinning Cat', contemplates Paris in the Age of Terror.

Claude Chabrol puts Isabelle Huppert's formidable, Sphinx-like luminosity to fine use as the prosecutor-judge in 'Comedy of Power', based loosely on a real-life French corruption scandal.

'Lunacy' is a characteristically visceral mix of live action and stop-motion animation from Jan Svankmajer – leave it to the Czech surrealist lunatic to pump fresh blood into the idea of insanity as a functional state of mind.

As Anthony Kaufman pointed out on his indieWIRE blog, the festival featured more films from Iran than any other non-English-speaking country, even as tensions between Tehran and DC reached boiling point. One standout, Hamid Rahmanian's assured 'Day Break', begins in faux-documentary mode as a taut consideration of capital punishment in Iran, but it eventually switches gears to become a reticent interior journey as a condemned criminal's apprehension about his fate slowly transforms into the agony of a living death.

Tribeca is most consistent as a cornucopia of nonfiction filmmaking. Stanley Nelson's 'Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple' is a reminder that the awful fate of Jim Jones's doomed cult was all the more tragic for the group's founding ideals of racial and economic justice.

Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady's 'Jesus Camp', about the fervently conditioned children of evangelical Christians, may well provide a crystal ball into America's future under one God.

A significant proportion of films on the documentary slate examined the US war in Iraq. Andrew Berends' 'The Blood of My Brother' looks at the occupation's impact on the grieving brother of a fallen Iraqi, providing insight into the mindset behind the insurgency. The eventual prizewinner for best documentary feature, Deborah Scranton's 'The War Tapes', compiles footage shot by six National Guardsmen in Iraq, and succeeds in exposing the atrocity and the banality of war.

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