Tribeca Film Festival 2007 Preview

Perhaps because it was conceived in the wake of tragedy, the Tribeca Film Festival, now in its sixth year, presents itself with a more overt and insistent air of celebration than many other film festivals worldwide (and boy, are there plenty of them). New York City is well known as a movie town, and Tribeca is the first film festival that I know of that was co-conceived and co-founded by not just a movie star but a bona-fide cinematic icon. Robert De Niro, a longtime resident of Manhattan's downtown Tribeca neighborhood, came up with the fest with producing partner Jane Rosenthal in the wake of the 9/11/01 terrorist attacks on New York. But for its first few years, the fest's celebratory angle seemed more a matter of civic, rather than cinematic, pride. Which, given the circumstances, was entirely understandable, and all for the good. After all, one of De Niro's stated reasons for creating the fest was to bring an economic boost to a downtown facing potential economic impoverishment as a result of the 9/11 catastrophe.
Hence, Tribeca used its inborn Hollywood clout to get the big guns involved, figuring that premiering humungoid tentpole event movies for the fest would be a good way to bring in the paying customers and, even more important today, the corporate sponsorships that pump money into both the festival itself but the city in which it's held. The strategy worked. The Tribeca Film Festival became one of the world's best known such events almost as soon as it was announced, which put it in the awkward position of being famous before it had even established an identity.
A few years in, the identity it seemed to be establishing was one that made skeptics — at first hesitant to criticize the festival for obvious reasons — raise their voices to a modest peep. But those voices were drowned out by media outlets that got a kick out of what they considered Tribeca's anti-snob appeal. In a Sunday New York Times Arts and Leisure piece on the festival in 2004, writer Rebecca Traister, effortlessly expressing the glib philistinism that some New York media types seem to believe is the hallmark of true cosmopolitan sophistication, practically cooed in pleasure recounting the tale of festival honchos juggling the schedule of a particular screening so it would not conflict with the series finale of Friends. Traister went on to express breathless delight that one of Tribeca's offerings that year would be a feature starring The Olsen Twins.

The problem is that while glib philistines might get off on the tweaking of hardcore movie lovers, it's the latter that will wind up making the biggest and potentially most loyal part of a film festival audience. And in the years since 2004, Tribeca has been cannily paring down its blockbuster mentality and ramping up its cinephile appeal. The strategy seems to be creating an event mentality around one or two carefully chosen pictures. Last year it was the Tom Cruise actioner Mission: Impossible III that bore the burden of several days worth of hype before landing at Tribeca; United 93 took on the mantle of the more serious-minded event movie at the festival, which was entirely apt given its subject matter. This year, rather ingeniously, Spider-Man week, which culminates with the U.S. premiere of Spider-Man 3, takes Tribeca out of Manhattan and into Queens — home of much New York movie history (e.g., the storied Kaufman Astoria studios) not to mention the home borough of Spider-Man's alter-ego, Peter Parker.
Such events generate enough glitz to give an aura to the entire festival, which has an eclectic roster that encompasses many stripes of New-York-centric filmmaking (including a work by underground pioneer Ken Jacobs) as well as a healthy international inclination-although veterans of Cannes, Venice, Toronto and Sundance will spy more than a few familiar titles in the catalog. But Tribeca is emerging as a more consumer-friendly than industry-centric kind of fest, which is all to the good. More and more, I see it attracting an emerging, as yet unidentified, type of festivalgoer: young New Yorkers with a healthy sense of adventure who aren't necessarily full-time film nuts, but who are eager to take full advantage of yet another New York cultural perk. And by the same token, Tribeca does feature enough putatively mainstream fare to take the pressure to be more populist off of the stalwart New York Film Festival, which is frequently attacked by those of Traister's ilk for, you know, showing too many movies that have subtitles and so on. So while Tribeca's identity is still not entirely fixed, maybe that's a good thing; in its current state, it's providing a lot to cheer on.