The Sixth Tribeca Film Festival (review)

This year's Tribeca Film Festival (TFF) had much the same strengths and weaknesses as last year's. Its great strength was in documentaries and its weakness was in narrative, especially horror (which was terrible). But some of the Festival's annual recurring sections are flourishing. Festival director Peter Scarlet wants the TFF to make an impact beyond the red carpet (though that still dominates) and to raise political and cultural consciousness. To this end, he has made some inspired choices of unusual films and has brought in some good program advisors (though he needs new horror programmers!). The jewel in the Festival comes out of this intention. TFF screened The Pelican(FR, 1973), directed by the French actor Gérard Blain, and seen in the US for the first time some thirty-four years after its original release. This film, about a father trying to contact his young son, with few spoken lines and some remarkable images, is not only deeply emotional but penetratingly echoes Robert Bresson without imitation.

Also, the growing Restored/Rediscovered selection this year carried some fascinating entries: Roberto Gavaldón's unusual Autumn Days(MX, 1962), shot by Gabriel Figueroa, on one hand a look at a traditional woman (Pina Pellicer) in 1960s Mexico and on the other a strange exploration of pathology and despair; Cinda Firestone's famous Attica(US, 1974), newly restored and rarely shown, so effectively crafted that its impact still stands; The Forty-First(Grigori Chukhrai, USSR, 1956), a Stalinist tale in haunting Technicolor that, for all its staging, was both grim and poignant. Programmer Jon Gartenberg made some adventurous choices with his Portraits of Women(films by or about women) and his 211-minute In The Beginning was the Image: Conversations with Peter Whitehead(Paul Cronin, UK, 2006), about English filmmaker-turned-falconer Peter Whitehead, whose philosophy of documentary filmmaking as a mutilation (cut-up) of reality's process is attracting academic study. Though this oddity was a welcome Festival inclusion, the film didn't probe sufficiently beyond Whitehead's veneer and viewed him too reverentially. His avowed 1960s radicalism didn't extend past the usual European outrage at American crimes. Whitehead made no attempt to examine British politics though he was a working-class boy whose brilliance propelled him into the University of Cambridge. He seemed damaged by this extreme outsiderism and had constructed a world that ignored what he couldn't challenge (including having eight children, none of whom he seemingly lived with, despite having had an absent father).

Other documentaries, among many of note, were Shame(PA/US, 2006), young director Mohammed Naqvi's plain, intelligent exposé of feudalism in Pakistani villages and Mukhtaran Mai's unbelievable challenge to the entire system after she was gang-raped as punishment. Taxi to the Dark Side(Alex Gibney, US, 2007) (TFF Award for Best Documentary Feature) hit hard at the torture policies of Bush's cabinet, and The Workshop(Jamie Morgan, UK, 2006), about group sex as therapy, was noteworthy as a naïve, narcissistic document about narcissism and cults.

Four features stood out: Jia Zhang-Ke's Still Life(CN, 2006), though a genre film about the lives of displaced Chinese, returned to the cinematic force of his Platform(CN, 2002), where the screen dominates the characters. Here, the camera was rarely three or four feet away from a person, who was often backed to a wall, making an intense claustrophobic atmosphere. The brilliant Kira Muratova's Two in One(UA, 2006) was a very black comedy that seamlessly played with cinema's form by using an interior theatrical space that evolved into exteriors. The Last Man(Ghassan Salhab, LB/FR, 2006), from Beirut, utilized simple cinematic techniques such as blurring the screen to great effect, in an inventive, minimalist tale of a man's obsession with the city's vampire-like killer. The beautiful Time and Winds(Reha Erdem, TR, 2006) was about a small Turkish village.

Among the disappointments were Nouri Bouzid's suicide bomber story, Making Of . . .(TN/ MA, 2006), which had a clever self-reflexive device...