Three thousand miles from the wildflowers carpeting Santa
Barbara County, New York City is also bursting with colors — a kaleidoscope of
cinematic visuals blooming in select theaters thanks to the Tribeca Film
Festival. Each April, the folks at the Robert DeNiro-founded festival present a
smorgasbord of cinematic delights including, world premieres of U.S. and
international films, previews of new and favorite television programs,
discussions with actors and filmmakers, virtual storytelling, and anniversary
screenings. This year’s slate is, as usual, choc full of treats.
The festival opened Wednesday evening, April 24, with the
premier of Roger Ross Williams’s documentary The Apollo. The HBO backed film interweaves the history of the
iconic Harlem theater, which opened in 1934, with footage from the theater’s recent staging of Ta-Nehisi Coastes’ Between the World and Me, a dramatic
reading of excerpts from the award-winning book.
The next day, projectors began whirring as films lit up
movie screens in Chelsea, Tribeca, and East Village theaters. The morning
opened with director Frederic Tcheng’s documentary Halston, about the eponymously named designer who began his career
in the late 1950s — he first made a name for himself for designing Jackie
Kennedy’s pill box hat, which she wore to JFK’s inauguration — and became an
international sensation in the 1970s thanks his deconstructed clothing designs.
Using sumptuous materials such as silk and chiffon, Halston’s creations were
often made out of one contiguous piece of material, had no zippers or buttons,
and were cut on the bias, thus achieving a simple, elegantly flowing dress. Halston is ultimately an Icarus-esque
tale in which the man flies too close to the sun, falls and drowns in a roiling
sea of his own creation.
The docs this year are broad in scope and across media; the
aforementioned Halston; the Showtime
series Wu-Tang Clan: Of Mics and Men,
which looks at the Staten Island hip-hop group’s rise from the Park Hill projects;
and director Michael Barnett’s film Changing
the Game, which explores the complexities of being a transgender teen
athlete, are three examples from a roster of many.
If Tribeca suffers from anything it is too many choices — not a bad problem to have, per se, but as an attendee it can be overwhelming. The good news is that generally whatever one chooses will be high-level fare.