Tribeca Film Festival 2022 – “Beba” (Wendy Moscow)

June 16, 2022.  Messy, joyful, searching, angry, self-important, honest, revealing, smart… all are words that describe the personal documentary “Beba,” and Beba (Rebeca Huntt) herself, as she navigates the uncertain waters of childhood, teenagehood, college and the transition to becoming “grownish” (while living in her parents’ apartment). The special challenges of being Afro-Latina in America are explored and embraced, as well. Huntt uses the medium of film effectively to declare, “Here I am (like it or not)!” There’s a lot to like.

She begins by saying “This is my part. Nobody else speak,” and what follows is a rare (bravely self-created) opportunity for a young Black woman of Latinx descent to make her life known. Instead of allowing the larger culture to define her, she is “the lens, the subject, the authority.”

Tribeca Film Festival 2022 – “Immersive Exhibition” – Part II (Wendy Moscow)

June 16, 2022. In our intro to Tribeca Immersives (part 1), we spoke about how the immersive exhibition at the festival is one of our favorite things to cover. Here are three more immersives that are definitely worth your attention.

“Emerging Radiance: Honoring the Nikkei Farmers of Bellevue, WA”

Tani Ikeda and Michelle Kumata have created a lovely and moving tribute to a Japanese-American community in Bellevue, Washington whose members were forcibly taken from their homes during WWII by the U.S. government and incarcerated in concentration camps. After having transformed seemingly inarable land into thriving farms (land that had been clear-cut and abandoned by European settlers), everything they owned and worked for was lost. They had lived in Bellevue from 1920 to 1942.

A hand-painted AR mural comes to life as viewers aim their phones at individual portraits within the mural. The stories they tell (taken from digitally collected interviews) are heartbreaking but told with dignity and grace. Actual background footage from that place and time appears behind the drawn characters, and flying cranes provide final punctuation that beautifully raises up the narrative. Adding insult to injury, very few of the farmers were able to return after they were released, due to prejudice and racism.

As we were leaving, we were given packets of dwarf sugar peas, legacy seeds from those farmers who were displaced. Though most of us are aware of the shameful history of the internment camps, this project tells an important story within the story — helping us to see the human faces behind this very American tragedy.

Tribeca Film Festival 2022 – “Immersive Exhibition” – Part I (Wendy Moscow and Seth Shire)

(top to bottom) A mask from “Planet City,” (photo by Wendy Moscow), a scene from “Container” and beneath, hands of the future as depicted in “Plastisapiens”

June 15, 2022.  One of our favorite things to cover at the Tribeca Festival is the Immersives Exhibition. Immersive presentations include VR (virtual reality, which requires a headset), AR (augmented reality, in which images come to life when aimed at with a phone or tablet) and holography (which requires none of the above). Several of these projects include elaborately constructed installations that help contextualize what the viewer is about to see, plunging you even more deeply into the world that the project director has created.

Tribeca Film Festival 2022 “Two Sisters and a Husband” (Seth Shire)

One of the many angst ridden moments from “Two Sisters and a Husband”

Misery not only loves company but in the Indian film “Two Sisters and a Husband” aggressively courts it with a vengeance. The film is an overwrought melodrama which pounds its characters’ angst into the audience with all the subtlety of a jack hammer.

The set up: Rajat (Dinker Sharma) has been forced into an arranged marriage with Tara (Avani Rai), but is in love with Tara’s younger sister, Amrita (Manya Grover) who he has impregnated. This situation could have made for an interesting exercise in neo-noir. Instead Rajat and Amrita escape to what has to be the seediest hotel in the Himalayas where Rajat gets a job as a manager. To make matters worse, his boss Bhed Singh (Himanshu Kohli) is so miserable that he keeps trying to drown himself in his bathtub. Meanwhile Tara, understandably suffering from marriage angst, sees a therapist for whom she falls, but her love is unrequited.

Tribeca Film Festival 2022 “Turn Every Page” (Seth Shire)

(l. to r.) Author Robert Caro and editor Robert Gottlieb, as seen in Turn Every Page, directed by Lizzie Gottlieb. Photo credit: Claudia Raschke. Courtesy of Wild Surmise Prods

June 12, 2022.  Filmmaker Lizzie Gottlieb’s “Turn Every Page” is a fun, interesting and at times philosophical look at the relationship between historian Robert Caro and his long time editor Robert Gottlieb.  Over the past 50 years the two have worked together on five books, totaling 4,888 pages.  Ms. Gottlieb is the daughter of Robert Gottlieb which adds a personal level to the story – a child’s curiosity about a parent.

“Turn Every Page” depicts a hand crafted, meticulous way of working that is most likely in its final days.  Caro writes in long hand before typing up his pages, composing them on a typewriter.  While the older technology lacks the capability for one to hit “SAVE,” Caro uses carbon paper for each page he types and puts the carbon copies, many years’ worth, in a cabinet above his home refrigerator.  He explains that every now and then he gets up on a ladder to give everything a shove back.  Somehow there is always more room – take that, google drive!  Caro uses thumbtacks and a cork board to display and review the pages of his book’s outline in his office. It’s not Power Point but it clearly works.

Tribeca Film Festival 2022 “My Name is Andrea” (Wendy Moscow)

Feminist Icon Andrea Dworkin

June 12, 2022. She was tarred by the mainstream media as irredeemably angry, unreasonable and man-hating, but Andrea Dworkin was so much more complex than her media image. “My Name is Andrea,” an intensely emotional film directed by Pratibha Parmar, presents a nuanced portrait of a woman justifiably outraged by the treatment of women in our patriarchal culture, and especially by the violence, often sexual, perpetrated against them/us.

She realized, as a young activist with an intersectional understanding of the world, that self-determination was denied to most people — only those who were white, male and wealthy had the privilege of fully owning their lives. Living in Amsterdam in 1968, but yearning to help oppressed people back home in the U.S., she asked, “Can I write for the disposed, the marginalized, the tortured?” But her focus, as an activist and an author, would be decrying a culture that promotes the sexual depredation of women, often without consequence for the male perpetrators. Sexual violence, she said, “pulls [a woman’s] integrity apart and robs her of her sense of brilliance and beauty as a human being.” For Dworkin, “freedom of speech for women begins with the integrity of the body.” In that light, she saw pornography as a dangerous manifestation of the sexual subordination of women, and was a leader in the anti-porn movement.

Tribeca Film Festival 2022 – “Subject” (Seth Shire)

Makunda Angulo (from the “The Wolfpack”) one of the documentary subjects in “Subject.”

June 11, 2022.  Filmmaker Jennifer Tiexiera Camilla Hall’s “Subject” is a fascinating, thought provoking and, at its heart, very meta study – a documentary about, well, documentaries!  More specifically it is a film about those who have been, as per the title, the “subjects” of such films.  So, here they are again, subjects of a documentary to talk about their experiences as subjects of documentaries.  Their insights and experiences make for a topic that is very compelling and not much discussed.