The Second Time Around: New Festivals, Special Programs

The Tribeca Film Festival, May 3-11, 2003; The New York Underground Film Festival, March 5-11, 2003; New Directors/New Films, March 26-April 6, 2003; The Human Rights Watch Film Festival, June 13-26, 2003; The New York Video Festival, July 23-27 2003.

Speculation in the film world was running riot by the beginning of 2003: would the Tribeca Film Festival emerge for its second round? If so, what would happen? What would this festival look like? And how would the festival affect the myriad other film events in New York City? Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal had to be credited with pulling off the event the first time out, but would lightning strike twice? By February, it was announced that the festival would take place in May; when the full program was available, the results were staggering—over 200 films would be shown in an eight day period at the beginning of May! It was, in fact, one of the biggest film festivals ever to be held in New York City. Previously, the New York Film Festival had been the model for New York City film events. The New York Film Festival has existed for forty years as a self-admittedly "boutique" festival, a highly selective event showing an average of thirty films, representing the best of the best (according to the selection committee). But New York City had never had a massive international film festival, with a multitude of films screening simultaneously at several venues, the model of Berlin, Cannes, Venice. In North America, Montréal and Toronto have continued in that tradition; San Francisco has tried to develop into such an international festival. Could the Tribeca Film Festival pull off such an event?

Headed by Peter Scarlett, previously the director of the San Francisco Film Festival, this year's Tribeca Film Festival had many problems, but, given the relatively short period of time in which it was organized, the fact that the festival happened at all was amazing. Because of the mandate to create a major international event, the festival tried to be all things to all people. In many ways, its success was often partial, marginal, particular; Entertainment Weekly reviewed the festival, and faulted it as a market, yet the Tribeca Film Festival had never claimed itself as a market, merely as an event to call attention to a particular neighborhood (lower Manhattan) in New York City. The point was to attract audiences to the area; whether or not the event actually succeeded in that aim was one of the questions the festival raised.

As with any major festival, one aim was to have a majority of premiere screenings. As stated in the festival guide, "This year's festival will screen the premieres of feature films, documentaries, and shorts representing more than forty countries, as well as restored classics and major Hollywood studio releases." There were different categories: Special Screenings (a category that included Hollywood premieres, as well as special events such as Guy Maddin's Cowards Bend the Knee, his serial of "peep show" vignettes), the Competition sections (Features and two Documentary categories, as well as a Short Film Competition), Showcase (out of competition films including many foreign features having their New York area premiere), NY NY (features and documentaries shot in New York City), Restored and Rediscovered, Black Filmmaker Foundation (a selection of African-American films from the last twenty-five years), Midnight, and a Family Film Festival (including the premiere of The Lizzie Maguire Movie). With all this, trying to decide what to see might be daunting, but the upshot was that the law of averages simply demanded that there be a few good works to be found.

As with most large-scale festivals, you couldn't see everything, and you kept hearing about some extraordinary film which you just missed. But when you...