Tribeca Film Festival 2012: Springtime for Documentaries

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Previews

Published on Sunday, 11 March 2012 05:08

Written by Laura Blum

Spring is springing. Green shoots are poking through, daylight is waxing and the Tribeca Film Festival is hatching its lineup. The 11th TFF (April 18 - 29, 2012) announced slate has film fans chirping lustily as they prep to hibernate in dark plexes following winter's end.

Hope springs eternal that the narrative selection will dazzle -- and indeed, this year shows promise -- yet it's the documentary silo that has consistently delivered at lower Manhattan's hallmark fest.

This year, a trio of nonfiction films will receive Special Screenings. There's Tracy Holder and Karen Thorsen's Joe Papp in Five Acts, about the legendary Public Theater founder and his imprint on artists from Meryl Streep to James Earl Jones.

And the performing arts motif extends to two music-themed works: Danny Bennett's The Zen of Bennett, tracking Tony Bennett's recording of a duets album with Lady Gaga, Aretha Franklin and other stars, and Queen: Days of Our Lives, Matt O'Casey's five-decade history of the band, including Freddie Mercury's swan song.

Creative talent also catches the glint of the Spotlight Section. Michael Sládek's BAM150 will take viewers off-wing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, across the river from the Public. Pushing 150, the stage home to such luminaries as Pina Bausch and Peter Brook comes alive with performance footage alongside interviews with such BAM stalwarts as Robert Wilson and Laurie Anderson.

Let Fury Have the Hour, by Antonino D’Ambrosio, explores the legacy of The Clash through Manu Chao, Rachid Taha and M.I.A., among some 50 other activist artists and thinkers. A lens on the creative rebellion against Thatcherite and Reaganite politics and its lingering sway, D'Ambrosio's mixed-media opus is inspired by his book of the same title.

Though Let Fury Have the Hour took engagé epic Reds as an early muse (per Tim Robbins' suggestion), it's The Russian Winter that invokes revolutionary John Reed's adopted home. Petter Ringbom centers his documentary on Grammy-nominated John Forté and his concert tour across Russia as the former-Fugees-bandmate-turned-prison-inmate journeys within.

The music continues with Searching for Sugar Man. In it, Swedish documentarian Malik Bendjelloul traces the intrigues surrounding 70s rocker Rodriguez, whose career tanked until his pirated music made it big in apartheid South Africa. Years later, two fans set out to see if rumors of his death were exaggerated. The resulting wild ride earned this film a World Cinema Special Jury Prize and Audience Award at Sundance.

Shifting focus from music to cinema, Side by Side dispatches producer Keanu Reeves to both the frontlines and rear guard of digital filmmaking. Documentary-maker Chris Kenneally puts over a motion picture who's who, featuring commentary by Danny Boyle, James Cameron, David Fincher, George Lucas, David Lynch, Martin Scorsese and Lars Von Trier, to name but seven masters.

The A-listers who parade through Mansom strike a somewhat frothier tenor -- as to be expected in a film directed by Morgan Spurlock. Jason Bateman, Paul Rudd and Zach Galifianakis are among the brain trust examining today's metrosexual male. Some viewers may cock a snook at the species and wonder how we got so spoiled and obsessed.

And the same may hold for another Spotlight doc, whose subjects are true dogs. That would be One Nation Under Dog, directed by Jenny Carchman, Ellen Goosenberg Kent and Amanda Micheli. The human-canine connection takes the foreground as we meet a man who pays a fortune for his dog's legal defense, pet loss support groups, rescuers who save dogs from death row and other protagonists of both love stories and sob stories with man's best friend.

Other docs at TFF 2012 include: 

• Ballroom Dancer
• Downeast
• Fame High
• The Flat
• High Tech, Low Life
• The List
• Off Label
• Planet of Snail
• The Revisionaries
• The Virgin, The Copts and Me
• Wavumba

The opening night film in the World Documentary competition is The World Before Her. Directed by Nisha Pahuja, the film contrasts the ethos of the Miss India beauty pageant with that of Hindu religious extremism.

A first for TFF, both the World Narrative competition and its documentary counterpart will feature opening night selections on April 19.

This year’s programming team has gotten a makeover.

The new Artistic Director Frédéric Boyer comes to Tribeca from the Cannes Film Festival. Geoffrey Gilmore, Chief Creative Officer of Tribeca Enterprises, has expanded his role in overseeing the Festival program. Genna Terranova is now Director of Programming, and Cara Cusumano returns as Programmer.

For more info go to: http://www.tribecafilm.com/festival/

Tribeca Film Festival
April 18 - 29, 2012

various venues

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