Tribeca Film Festival 2016
New York, April 13 - 24
Drake Stutesman
Some Films to See:
Set in the beginnings of student revolts in Tunisia, Bouzid’s story of a young singer and her eventual conflict with police, is wrapped in an intimate story of her relationship with her mother, a mother-daughter relationship too little explored on screen. Bouzid gives life to the teenager’s world, her desires, talents, and recognitions, as much as she exposes the real horror of arrest. She films the interrogation as violently threatening by using close ups but doesn’t film any violence. The film is compact as both a metaphor for relationship of citizen to state as well as family to family.
An intimate film about Tunisia’s political conflicts and about bonds between mother and daughter.
Dir: Kelly Duane De La Vega and Katie Galloway
2016
84 min
USA
Winner: Tribeca Film Festival Audience Award for Best Documentary
The Tribeca Film Festival 2016 carried some strong social justice films as well as panels and awards ceremonies (see below). In The Return, directors Kelly Duane De La Vega and Katie Galloway follow two men leaving California prisons and returning to their families and neighborhoods, after serving long sentences (having been released after 3-strikes law was repealed). In a straight forward manner, this film simplifies the complexities of a person’s re-entry into the world outside of incarceration - the court systems, job searches, personal pain, joy and confusion - which makes this film easily accessible and so a valuable contribution to the prison reform dialogue. The film doesn’t go too deeply into the lives of the men, their sons, grandchildren, daughters, friends, wives, all of whom appear on camera yet their opinions and feelings, as much as those of the two men, guide the film. But De La Vega and Galloway keep the film distant enough to allow it to act, not just as a personal story, but as an illustration of the many, many more lives who are involved in post-prison re-entry.
An emotional and accessible film about a person’s re-entry into the world outside of incarceration.
SEE the Framework permanent feature, PRISON USA, which juxtaposes poses details of current American crime and imprisonment issues with renditions of crime and prison, from sources such as documentaries, archives, media, and features. PRISON USA aims to raise ideas about how and why our culture approaches or ignores these topics through fiction and nonfiction.
Kristi Jacobson had unprecedented access to a Supermax security unit of solitary confinement cells, located in the Red Onion State Prison, in Virginia. She positions the sterile, newly painted prison floor and cells by opening and closing the film in scenes of the surrounding forest and this device visually highlights the against-nature conditions of solitary confinement, considered by many to be torture. Jacobson reveals prison to be a human place, extremely loud, filled with shouts and cries, as well as system of systematic repetition. Her interviews, over a year, with a number of men, some incarcerated for decades, builds a picture of what this life is like. It is a simple document, rather than a story, of these men’s thoughts and, as such, becomes a basic argument against the use of solitary confinement.
After the April 18 screening, six panelists discussed the film. Joining a social justice documentary with, not just the director, but activists involved with social justice means that TFF makes their public screening a forum for a prison reform discussion. Panelists included:
Jean Casella, Moderator; Co-Director and Editor-in-chief, Solitary Watch - the preeminent source on solitary confinement in the U.S. and co-author of the new book, "Hell is a Very Small Place: Voices from Solitary." Jean is also a consultant on the VR project 6x9 at Tribeca's Storyscapes.
Amy Fettig, Director of ACLU "Stop Solitary" Campaign and Senior Staff Counsel for the ACLU's National Prison Project. As director of the "Stop Solitary" campaign, she seeks to end the practice of long-term isolation in our nation's prisons, jails and juvenile detention centers through public policy reform, legislation, litigation and public education.
Scott Paltrowitz, Associate Director, Correctional Association of New York. Scott engages in coalition-building, community outreach, and advocacy challenging particular abuses of the prison system, including solitary confinement, and the lack of adequate medical care and mental health services
Vince Warren, Executive Director, Center for Constitutional Rights. Vince and the CCR played a significant role in challenging the state of California for its use of prolonged solitary confinement in the infamous Pelican Bay prison. The case reached settlement on September 1, 2015, ending indeterminate solitary confinement in California, and dramatically reducing the number of people in isolation.
Five Mualimm-ak, a leading voice on prison reform, activist, founder of Incarcerated Nation and a survivor of solitary confinement in NY State Prison. Out of the 12 years he served inside New York prisons, five were in solitary confinement. The charges against him were later overturned.
Kristi Jacobson, Producer/Director, SOLITARY. Her films capture nuanced, intimate, and provocative portrayals of individuals and communities. Her previous films include A Place at the Table (Participant Media/Magnolia Pictures), Toots, winner of National Board of Review's Top Documentary Award, and American Standoff (HBO), produced by two-time Oscar-winner Barbara Kopple.
[Information from Cinematic publicity]
A strong and simple documentary about the destructiveness of solitary confinement in American prisons.
SEE the Framework permanent feature, PRISON USA, which juxtaposes poses details of current American crime and imprisonment issues with renditions of crime and prison, from sources such as documentaries, archives, media, and features. PRISON USA aims to raise ideas about how and why our culture approaches or ignores these topics through fiction and nonfiction.
A fascinating documentary about Bassem Youseff, who, remarkably, if not unbelievably, managed to challenge, as a political comedian (with charismatic humor), Egypt’s regimes through the end of Hosni Mubarak’s reign, at the peak of Arab Spring, through the rule of the Moslem Brotherhood, and into the current Abdel Fattah el-Sisi government. Though his show had a viewership nightly of 30 million, Youseff was removed from broadcast and ultimately forced to flee the country, with his wife and child, and a single suitcase. Even to outsiders, who don’t know the inside jokes or the political landscape, Youseff is hilarious as well as acerbic. Taksler initiates the audience immediately, opening the film with Arabic words, which, when translated, are so funny, it’s hard to forget them. Though Youseff was sited internationally as the “Jon Stewart of Egypt,” his constant threat of removal places his rise, his popularity and his humor in a category of its own and Taksler, who worked on the Jon Stewart show, captures some of that uniqueness, bringing Youseff’s verve, unusual ascent, and terrible exile to life. Youseff, now living in the US, is a public speaker on the importance of blocking corruption and power through words, funniness and satire versus the use of violence.
Fascinating documentary on the unique political humor and career of internationally renowned comedian Bassem Youseff.
Winner: Tribeca Film Festival Award For Best Screenplay in a US Narrative Feature Film
This droll, laugh out loud funny, fun, clever, spare story with ingeniously multiple layers won the Tribeca Film Festival best screenplay award, deservedly. Jungermann, who wrote and directed the film and played the lead, Morgan, creates a weird yet oddly ordinary story about as she put it in the Q&A, “relationship fears.” She covers a range of those fears, from relationships between ex-lovers, to those of friends and groups of friends, to new love affairs. With inspiration from by Claude Chabrol, Alfred Hitchcock, Woody Allen and others, Jungermann works with humor and horror and centers the film on Morgan’s interest in a new woman. This is set against Morgan’s work as a podcaster (with her ex-girlfriend) on a show about serial killers who are women. This hilarious yet oddly metaphoric obsession becomes a floating backstory that is both funny and uncomfortably close to the bone. In a society obsessed with killers, murder shows, and crime, Jungermann’s choice of gris eminences (women who kill) poses something about how personally meaningful that American fixation is and how it may mirror the unnamable disturbances people feel about intimacy. Jungermann is bolder than most in drawing the two realities together. Annette O’Toole is brilliant as an imprisoned serial killer whom Morgan interviews periodically.
A delightful, amazingly funny film, with an undercurrent about fear of intimacy that film deliberately does not resolve.
Dir: Priscilla Anany
101 min
USA/ Ghana
Winner: Tribeca Film Festival Award for Best New Narrative Director
Children of the Mountain specifically addresses the superstitions, in Ghana, around children born with defects and illnesses. It ends with a written declaration on the screen, asking mothers to seek medical help and not be pressurized by people’s opinions into rejecting their disabled children. Priscilla Anany lights up this story with the vivid talent of her lead, Rukiyat Masud, as the young mother who, after giving birth to a baby with a severe cleft palate, downs syndrome and cerebral palsy, goes through many difficulties - rejection by the father, exploitation by a local market medical huckster, abuse by a spiritual healer, scorn from villagers, bad advice from her mother, as well as her own fears. Anany makes the film both a narrative about friendship and romance as well as one created to be a parable. Filming many scenes in wide screen, Anany brings out the Ghanase landscape and its life through which she has Masud travel, with its forests, villages, markets, and rivers. There is a warmth in the close-ups and in the wide screen that makes the film’s story universal.
A strong film about motherhood, its closeness, its certainty and uncertainty.
THE SHOW OF SHOWS: 100 YEARS OF VAUDEVILLE, CIRCUSES AND CARNIVALS
Dir: Benedikt Erlingsson
2015
77 min
UK/ICELAND
Using footage, from the 19th and 20th centuries, from various parts of the world, especially Europe and America, the film reveals carnival acts, circus shows, music hall and vaudeville acts, from preparation to breakdown. Erlingsson uses no narration because, as he described it in interview, it “doesn’t need it,” the images speak for themselves. He presents the material as a three act “dramaturgy” and the voluptuous music acts as “glue.” He sees the film as showing “the primitive in us, looking at what entertains us.” There’s humanity and inhumanity in these acts. Showing people as “beautiful and horrible,” the images are fascinating but Erlingsson, described the footage as “unique” because “we are able to see the same act repeated from different times, to see the patterns that have existed for hundreds of years, maybe even thousands.” The Show of Shows doesn’t make these shows a curiosity, rather draws us in closer to feel the realness of these acts, to see why people want to perform and why people want to see certain kinds of performances. The film is composed of 100 year's worth of footage but it opens the door to seeing thousands of years of history as flesh and blood.
A lyrical document of carnival acts, repeated many times, in many decades, in many countries.
The brilliant DJ Z- Trip returned in 2016 to score his second Harold Lloyd film, this year, Safety Last! His inventive, subtle and exuberant sound track, which follows the film’s nuances, has become a hit with the Lloyd estate and more are planned, including possibly the release of Lloyd’s films with DJ Z-Trip’s scores on DVD. More!
DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION AWARDS
http://www.tribecadisruptiveinnovationawards.com
SEVENTH ANNUAL AWARDS FOR
“leading innovators and creators
impacting social transformation”
AWARDED BY:
THE TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL AND
THE DISRUPTOR FOUNDATION
The Tribeca Film Festival is taking a proactive role by awarding these awards in collaboration with Harvard professor Clayton M. Christensen’s Disruptor Foundation (http://disruptorfoundation.org). The Festival is mixing the culture of “festival” with the greater social culture, a far reaching political ideal.
This 2016 ceremony recognized a range of creative thinkers from the well known and established to the just beginning. The concept of “creative” here is linked to the concept of “being intrepid” which is realistic as all the honorees have acted with determination on their ideas but each honoree, when they spoke, did not pose “creative” or “disruptive” as unreachable states. Rather they urged the audience to use what they had, however small, and to jump into the stream of cultural and political activism. Even the most creative artists and most politically driven educators urged everyone to tap their own minds and draw out new ideas. The last speaker, filmmaker Nate Parker, spoke so eloquently that Clayton Christenson, who followed him for his wrap up speech, cried and said he couldn’t add anything else. The theater was not full but this powerful grouping should become an in demand event.
Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Award 2016 honorees:
Thomas Heatherwick: Lifetime Achievement Award Honoree
Founder and Design Director, Heatherwick Studio
Thomas Heatherwick is a British designer whose prolific and varied work is characterized by its ingenuity, inventiveness and originality. He founded Heatherwick Studio in 1994 to bring design, architecture and urban planning together in a single workspace. Known for projects like the UK Pavilion at the Shanghai 2010 Expo, the cauldron for the 2012 London Olympics, and the Learning Hub at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, Heatherwick Studio is currently working in four continents on projects valued at over £2 billion. Thomas is a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, a Royal Academician and in 2004 became the youngest Royal Designer for Industry.
Richard Leakey: Lifetime Achievement Award Honoree
Chair, Kenya Wildlife Service and Founder & Chair, Turkana Basin Institute
Dr. Richard Leakey is currently a Professor of Anthropology at Stony Brook University, New York where he also serves as the Founder and Chair of the Turkana Basin Institute, a Kenya-based research facility that studies the history of life, past climate change and origins of humans. He is also Chairman of the Board of the Kenya Wildlife Service. Formerly Director of Kenya’s National Museums, Director of the Wildlife Conservation and Management Department, founding Director and Chairman of the Kenya Wildlife Service, Member of Parliament in Kenya and Head of the Public Service and Secretary to the Cabinet, Richard is now focused on funding the research institute at Turkana and working as Chair of the Kenya chapter of Transparency International and Founder of Wildlife Direct. Richard has played a key role in efforts to combat elephant and rhino poaching since the early 1990s, has actively campaigned for the protection of the Great Apes and he has become increasingly vocal about the threats to biodiversity arising from global climate change and the human population growth.
Nate Parker
Activist, Filmmaker
Actor, director, producer, writer, and humanitarian Nate Parker recently won both the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award for The Birth of a Nation, a 7-year labor of love for Parker which he wrote, directed, produced and starred in, to rousing acclaim and fanfare at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. Following its debut, the film received an enthusiastic standing ovation and was quickly acquired by Fox Searchlight Pictures, who will release the film October 7, 2016.
Scott Harrison
Founder and CEO, Charity Water
Scott Harrison is the founder and CEO of Charity Water, a nonprofit organization bringing clean and safe drinking water to people in developing countries. In nine years, with the help of more than 500,000 donors worldwide, Charity Water has raised over $207 million and funded over 19,000 water projects in 24 countries. When completed, those projects will provide over 6.18 million people with clean, safe drinking water.
Anthony D. Romero
Executive Director, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
Anthony D. Romero is the Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, the nation’s premier defender of liberty and individual freedom. He took the helm of the organization just seven days before the September 11, 2001 attacks. Shortly afterward, the ACLU launched its national Keep America Safe and Free campaign to protect basic freedoms during a time of crisis. They achieved court victories on the Patriot Act, uncovering thousands of pages of documents detailing the torture and abuse of detainees in U.S. custody, and filing the first successful legal challenge to the Bush administration’s illegal NSA spying program.
Louie Psihoyos
Executive Director, Oceanic Preservation Society and Director, “Racing Extinction” & “The Cove”
Louie Psihoyos is an Academy Award-winning filmmaker and Executive Director of the Oceanic Preservation Society (OPS). He is recognized as one of the top still photographers in the world, having created iconic images for National Geographic for 18 years, and hundreds of covers for other magazines. His ability to bring humanity and wit to complicated science stories carries over to his filmmaking. Psihoyos’s first film, “The Cove”, won the Oscar for Best Documentary Film of 2009 and over 75 other awards around the world. His second film, “Racing Extinction”, aired in 220 countries and territories and sparked the #StartWith1Thing movement.
Jennifer Jacquet
Assistant Professor, Department of Environmental Studies at NYU
Jennifer Jacquet is an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Studies at NYU. She is an environmental social scientist who studies large-scale cooperation dilemmas, such as overfishing, climate change, and the wildlife trade. She is the author of “Is Shame Necessary?” (Pantheon, 2015) about the evolution, function and future of the use of social disapproval in solving the tragedy of the commons.
Brent Stapelkamp
Conservationist and Photographer
Lion-obsessed Brent Stapelkamp has studied nature’s majestic apex predator in Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe for Oxford University’s Wildlife and Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU). Brent’s work is primarily about promoting ways to mitigate the conflict between lions and livestock owners with a healthy dose of wildlife photography to get his “lion fix.” He lives off-grid with his wife, Laurie Simpson and their seven year-old-son Oliver. For nine years Stapelkamp tracked and photographed Cecil the Lion who rose to fame after being hunted down under questionable circumstances. Cecil has become the global icon for conservation andBrent’s extensive collection of photos of Cecil and other wildlife in Africa is a true treasure trove.
Fabio Zaffagnini
Creator, Rockin’1000
Fabio Zaffagnini is the creator of Rockin’1000, a crowd-funded project that culminated in a performance where 1000-musicians gathered on a field in Italy to play one song: Learn to Fly by the Foo Fighters. The YouTube video chronicling this event went viral and has to date attracted 30 million views. The event served as an invitation for the Foo Fighters to come perform in Cesena, Italy which they accepted. Furthermore, Fabio is a co-founder of Trail Me Up, a startup that creates augmented virtual reality experiences of hike trails. In 2015 he entered the European Commission’s Expert list for his product design skills. Previously, he dealt with Technology Transfer and Industrial Research for private and public research centers. Earlier in his career, Fabio was a marine geologist at the Institute of Marine Sciences of the Italian National Research Center and the Euro-Mediterranean Centre for Climate Change. Fabio is an expert in social innovation, crowdfunding, crowdsourcing and product design and loves travelling, rock music and beach volleyball.
Alan Eustace
Engineer/Stratospheric Explorer
World–record free faller Alan Eustace retired as Senior Vice President of Knowledge in April 2015 after 13 years with Google. His lifelong interest in flying, skydiving, and engineering lead him to work with the world-class StratEx team to design, build, and fly, scuba-like system for the exploration of the Stratosphere. In the final test of this system, Alan and the StratEX team set three new skydiving world records, including the highest exit altitude (135,899 feet, 41,422 meters). Alan served as executive producer of the film “14 Minutes from Earth”.
Emily Callahan and Amber Jackson
Co-Founders, Blue Latitudes
Emily Callahan and Amber Jackson founded Blue Latitudes to unite science, policy and economics to create innovative solutions for the complex ecological challenges associated with offshore structures. Ms. Callahan is a marine conservation biologist, oil and gas consultant and explorer. She has a B.A. in Environmental Science and an M.A.S degree in Marine Biodiversity and Conservation from Scripps Institution of Oceanography. She has worked in the field of environmental consulting for over four years and conducted both international and domestic environmental impact assessments for governmental agencies and private sector clients, her key industry of expertise is in offshore oil and gas development and decommissioning. She worked as a field technician on the BP 252 Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico. This is where she witnessed firsthand the destruction and devastation wrought by an oil spill. However, it is also where she learned of a unique silver lining to the reality of offshore oil and gas development, the Rigs to Reefs program – a program that worked to preserve the ecosystems thriving beneath the surface.
Ms. Jackson is an oceanographer, environmental scientist and entrepreneur. She has a B.A. in Marine Science from UC Berkeley and a M.A.S in Marine Biodiversity and Conservation from Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Her expertise is unique, using technology to facilitate the intersection of science and communication. A former Ocean Curator at Google in partnership with the Sylvia Earle Alliance, she engineered and launched intelligent map layers in Google Maps that distill and relate complex concepts in ocean science for a variety of audiences. Ms. Jackson also has an established foundation as a scientist. A former National Science Foundation Researcher at the California Academy of Sciences, she developed a curiosity for using artificial habitats to mitigate anthropogenic losses and degradation of natural habitats. In California, the Rigs to Reefs program is an active example of this.
Lending Club
Accepting on behalf is Founder & CEO, Renaud Laplanche
Lending Club is the world’s largest online credit marketplace, facilitating personal loans, business loans, and financing for elective medical procedures. The company’s mission is to transform the banking system to make credit more affordable and investing more rewarding. Lending Club operates at a lower cost than traditional bank lending programs and passes the savings on to borrowers in the form of lower rates and to investors in the form of solid returns.
As Founder and CEO, Renaud is responsible for overseeing the overall strategic direction and operation of Lending Club, which he grew from a disruptive idea in 2006 to the world’s largest online credit marketplace today. He also serves as Chairman of Lending Club’s Board of Directors. Before founding Lending Club, Renaud was the Founder & CEO of TripleHop Technologies, an enterprise software company acquired by Oracle Corporation in June 2005. Prior to that, Renaud was a Senior Associate at New York law firm Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton. Renaud was recognized on Bloomberg Markets’ 2015 Most Influential List, an annual list that acknowledges 50 of the top leaders across technology, finance and politics around the globe. In 2014 he won the Economist Innovation Award in the consumer products category. He was ranked one of the top SMB CEOs by the Glassdoor Employees’ Choice Awards in 2015 and was named the “best start-up CEO to work for” by Business Insider in 2014. Renaud holds two world speed sailing records, including the Transpacific record. Renaud has an MBA from HEC and London Business School and a JD from Montpellier University. He is a frequent guest lecturer at Columbia Business School and a member of the Young Presidents’ Organization.
Max Kenner
Founder and Executive Director, Bard Prison Initiative
Max Kenner is the Founder and Executive Director of Bard Prison Initiative (BPI), which enrolls incarcerated individuals in academic programs culminating in Bard College degrees. He co-founded the Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison, supporting similar programs in 10 states. Kenner is Vice President for Institutional Initiatives and Advisor to the President on Public Policy & College Affairs at Bard College. He was a 2013-14 fellow-in-residence in American History at Harvard University and serves on Governor Cuomo’s NY State Council on Community Re-Entry and Reintegration, Re-Entry Subcommittee. Recent awards include The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s 40 Under 40, Richard Cornuelle Award for Social Entrepreneurship, and Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award in Education.
The Suskind Family
Ron, Cornelia, Walter and Owen Suskind
Owen Suskind, a boy silenced by autism, methodically memorized dozens of Disney movies. When his family realized this, they began to speak to him in Disney dialogue and turned their world into a stage, playing animated characters. Over years, Owen regained speech, learned to read by reading credits and eventually invented an original language — using scripts and lyrics — to express love, loss, kinship, and brotherhood. In turning his passion into a pathway, the Suskind family developed an approach, called “affinity therapy,” that is driving research and showing broad success in addressing the core social communication deficits of autism. Owen’s father, the author Ron Suskind, is now leading an effort to develop technology that allows multiple neurodiverse populations to harness their strong interests to drive social, emotion, and practical learning. Owen’s story can soon be seen in the new documentary Life, Animated from Academy Award® winning director Roger Ross Williams, an official selection of the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival.
Jenna Arnold and Greg Segal
Co-Founders, ORGANIZE
ORGANIZE is a nonprofit organization based in New York that leverages health data to end the organ donor shortage by applying smarter technologies, building more creative partnerships, and advocating for data-driven policies. Founded by Greg Segal and Jenna Arnold after Greg’s father waited five years for a heart transplant, ORGANIZE’s goal is to flip supply-and-demand for organ transplants in the US by building the country’s first central organ donor registry and creating more culturally relevant ways for people to share their donor wishes. Fast Company called ORGANIZE “the [one] to end the organ shortage.”
Adam Foss
Juvenile Justice Reformer
As Assistant District Attorney in the Juvenile Division of Suffolk County, Adam Foss has become one of Boston’s leading voices for compassion in criminal justice. Recognizing that prosecutors have a unique opportunity to intervene in offender’s lives, Foss co-founded the Roxbury CHOICE Program, a collaborative effort between defendants, the court, the probation department, and the D.A. to recast probation as a transformative experience rather than a punitive process. In addition to his work with the DA’s office, Foss is the founder of the SCDAO Reading Program, a project designed to bridge the achievement gap of area elementary school students.
Hilde Kate and Isabel Rose Lysiak
Orange Street News
Hilde Kate and Isabel Rose Lysiak run the monthly community newspaper Orange Street News, based out of Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania. The OSN recently received widespread acclaim for its reporting on community news and its response to critics who questioned its publishers ability to cover serious news because of their young age and gender. The Publisher of the OSN, Hilde Kate Lysiak, 9, is in charge of all content, reporting, writing, and taking all pictures while her older sister Isabel, 12, runs its multimedia operations where she produces, edits, and directs all video content for www.orangestreetnews.com
[as listed on Tribeca Film Festival website]