TRIBECA Film Festival 2024
New York, NY
June 5 – June 16, 2024
Drake Stutesman
Some films to see:
THE DOG THIEF
2024
Vinko Tomičić Salinas
Bolivia / Chile / Mexico / Ecuador / France / Italy
90 min.
The Dog Thief is a compelling film, the first feature for Chilean writer and director, Vinko Tomičić Salinas. Set in La Paz, the Bolivian capital, its story of a have not-and-have relationship between a poor teenager, Martin (played by Franklin Aro), who shines shoes, and a well-off older man, Novoa (played by Alfredo Castro), who is a men’s tailor, centers around the way that each person becomes important to the other. The sense of what is between them could be a father-son connection, a sexual connection, a mentor-mentee connection or a companion connection. The teen offers to care for the man’s much-loved dog, but this culminates in Martin stealing the dog for ransom. The film moves like a crime film, fast, compelling, but it remains deeply interior, deeply human. Tomičić Salinas films La Paz and its streets and its wastelands with beauty and with economy. He keeps the sense of the large city as tight and sprawling, and films in repeated locations. He also shows the city as small, showing it sitting at the base of a ring of high snowy mountains. The director’s ability to set a scene has a feel for the combination of solid reality and mysterious human life that filmmakers Chilean Raúl Ruis and Portuguese Manoel de Oliveira can conjure. But there is also a feel for Robert Bresson in some scenes. One, in particular, is memorable. Novoa takes Martin to a concert hall and Martin is dressed in a suit for the first time. The camera is focused on the two of them sitting in their seats and boy looks carefully around him, without moving his head. Off screen, the concert singing begins, in beautiful high notes, and a rosy light illuminates, but the camera never leaves the two and there is a close-up on Martin’s face. He has a slight smile while this experience overcomes him as he feels what it is to feel something that he has never known even existed.
Must see.
MADE IN ETHIOPIA
2024
Xinyan Yu, Max Duncan
United States / Ethiopia / Denmark / UK / Canada / Korea
91 min.
This is an eye-opening documentary on the under reported presence of Chinese run factories in Africa, which focuses on one compound, or as the owners describe it, one “industrial complex,” situated in Ethiopia. The film follows the lives of both workers and corporate leaders and brings a dimension to this world that can otherwise be hard to convey.
Must see.
WON – Special Jury Mention for a Documentary Feature. Jury statement: “For its multi-faceted exploration of the personal and collective cost of today’s face of globalization, we award the Special Jury Mention to MADE IN ETHIOPIA. Congratulations to the makers for opening a window to the lived experiences of those most directly impacted by the global labor industrial complex.”
MISSING FROM FIRE TRAIL ROAD
2024
Sabrina van Tassel
United States / France
101 min.
Sabrina Van Tassel’s important documentary, Missing From Fire Trail Road, focuses on the long search for the killer of Mary Ellen Johnson-Davis, a Tulalip woman, from the Tulalip Native reservation in the northern part of Washington state. Van Tassel brings to life the demeanor, lives and language of the Tulalips as she documents Johnson-Davis’s sisters’ and friends’ fight, not only to arrest her murderer, but for the inclusion of First Nation women in the United States’ law of the Violence Against Women Act. Van Tassel, with a long career as an investigative reporter, gives background to their contemporary traumas, some of which, such as the 19th and 20th century forced Catholic boarding schools for young First Nation children, have become part of the cultural conversation, after years of suppression. The film is timely as, coincidently, on May 14, 2024, the Catholic Church put out an international public apology for these atrocities, during the Tribeca Film Festival. Tassel weaves her film seamlessly and creates a memorable work.
Must see. Strong investigation of murders of First Nation women.
Jooyein (Lice)
2024
Vindhya Gupta
India
22 min.
Writer and director Vindhya Gupta’s evocative, short film, Jooyein (Lice), beautifully shot by Maria Belen Poncio, is part of Tribeca Film Festival’s shorts program and in the section titled, “Pride, No Prejudice.” On the theme of “pride and prejudice,” Jooyein is a simply told story, shot in rural India, about the complex feelings of child friendship. Gupta captures the instant beginnings of that friendship, its bonds and intensities, in two middle school girls who come together, showing what brings them together and what pulls them apart.
Must see.