Monday, May 08, 2006

Tribeca Wrap Up

On Sunday, after the festival had officially ended, I saw two movies: the NY, NY animation program curated by Bill Plympton, of "Guard Dog" fame, and "Voices of Bam," the winner of a special jury prize in the international documentary competition. "Vocies of Bam" was one of the most unique documentaries I've seen, and left me wondering how on earth the film-makers filmed the scenes they did. It absolutely deserved an award. As you might expect, some of the animated films were just wonderful and some were weird, and some were a little silly. My favorites were "The Back Brace," which might still be up on the TFF website, "Guide Dog," "Sita Sings the Blues" and Roof Sex. I also learned about the folks at "Underbelly" who seem very cool.
I didn't see many docs during the festival, and also didn't attend some of the more interesting or entertaining looking films because I figured they would get distributed in the US pretty soon.
My list of still-want-to-see movies from the festival, but will just wait till they hit the theaters, movie channels, and DVD retailers:

Jonestown: Life and Death of the People's Temple
Maquilapolis
Jesus Camp
Blood of My Brother
Choking Man
Civic Duty
Yo Soy Boricua
East Broadway
Viva Zapatero
The War Tapes
and of course
The Case of the Grinning Cat by Chris Marker

Oh yeah, and everybody kept telling me to go to Sir, No Sir!. too bad that it played at the union-busting IFC center. I will have to wait for the DVD, and they maybe I'll use it in my class on Vietnam.

And the best movie of the week was.......
Steven Colbert at the Whitehouse Correspondents Dinner.
Maybe at next year's Tribeca film festival, they can have Colbert on a panel about the internet distribution of this CSPAN video and the "hidden" audience of the blogosphere.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi,
We were in touch with the union regarding the film showing at IFC theatre. They were not asking folks to boycott. Sir no Sir is playing at another theatre or at least was until friday. With any luck it will get a larger release, response was good.

reb said...

thanks for letting me know. I have never set foot in there because of the union issue. Had I known, I might have made it for the flick. Hopefully, it will show at the Film Forum or Angelika soon.