Tribeca 2008 Wraps Up

Phil Nugent — Sun, 04 May 2008 23:00:00 GMT

The sixth annual Tribeca Film Festival wraps up tonight with the premiere of the Wachowski brothers' Speed Racer, which will soon be joining the festival's earlier glossy Hollywood premieres, Baby Mama with Tiny Fey and Amy Poehler and David Mamet's Redbelt, in general theatrical release. Most of the major festivals awards were handed out last Thursday. These included Tomas Alfredson's young-vampire story Let the Right One In, winner of the Founders Award for Best Narrative Feature; Hüseyin Karabey, winner of the Best New Narrative Filmmaker prize for his acted-documentary love story My Marlon and Brando; young Thomas Turgoose and Piotr Jagiello, who share the Best Actor honors for their teamwork in Shane Meadows's Somers Town; Eileen Walsh, winner of the Best Actress award for her work in Declan Recks's Eden; Gini Reticker's Pray the Devil Back to Hell, which won as the Best Documentary Feature; and Old Man Bebo, which earned its director, Carlos Carcas, a citation as Best New Documentary Filmmaker. The final prize, the Cadillac Award given to the "audience favorite" film based on ballots filled in by festivalgoers, was announced last night on the TV show Tribeca Presents: Best of the Festival. It went to C. Kareim Chrobog's documentary War Child, about the Sudanese heip-hop performer Emmanuel Jal, who fled civil war in his homeland and who, in the course of the filming, returned to Susan and was reunited with his family for the first time in eighteen years. (The effects of the African civil wars on the children of that region was something of an unplanned subtheme running through many of the best documentaries at Tribeca this year, from Pray the Devil Back to Hell to the ESPN film Kassim the Dream.) "Our audiences fell in love with Emmanuel Jal through Karim's film," said festival co-founder Jane Rosenthal. "I hope this movie not only serves to entertain people but is a call to action to help the millions of children in Africa in need of food, education, and love."

Tribeca is still a very young festival, one that has been both blessed and cursed by being bathed in a much denser concentration of publicity and critical scrutiny than, say, the Sundance or Toronto Film Festivals had to deal with at a comparable point in their development. Mention of last year's sprawling event, which was accused of overreaching, confusion, and inflated ticket prices, still inspires shudders in some of the people who worked on it and have the streak of white in their hair to prove it. This year things seemed to go much smoother, and in general the 2008 festival did pretty well by its self-made mandate to provide a forum for the art of film without giving a cold shoulder to the virtues of quality mass entertainment. Now that it's over, everyone who's spent the past dozen days in Tribeca can carry that mission forward by finally going to see Iron Man.

Tribeca Film Festival Review: Somers Town

Phil Nugent — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Somers Town reunites the talented writer-director Shane Meadows with Thomas Turgoose, the amazing, fifteen-year-old star of Meadows's previous film, the scalding This Is England. In that movie, Turgoose, playing an emotionally bewildered young skinhead, looked like an eleven-year-old boy with a fifty-year-old face. In Somers Town, which begins with Turgoose's character, Tommo, running away from his home in the midlands, arriving in the title location, and promptly getting stomped and picked clean by three sneering little thugs, turns out to be a kind of buddy comedy, and Turgoose proves himself a surprisingly deft comedian. Tommo strikes up a friendship with Marek (Piotr Jagiello), a sixteen-year-old polish immigrant who has a crush on a French waitress named Maria (Elisa Lasowski). After getting a look at her, Tommo very reasonably decides that he has a crush on her too, and, looking up at her face as it towers over him somewhere in the clouds, he immediately puts her verbal moves on her. He may look a little like a potato with sleep apnea, but having come all the way to the big city (it's big to him) in search of something better, and having discovered that something better is standing in a cafe holding a tray and asking if he wants another glass of water, he isn't about to just let the opportunity pass by. The little bastard is so convinced that he's smooth that he half-convinces you.

Shot in black and white and running just seventy minutes, Somers Town feels like a goof coming after This Is England and Meadows's violent revenge thriller Dead Man's Shoes, and it's a welcome goof. (It might be even more welcome if it were five or ten minutes shorter, if the cuts came from the final section, a color montage of happy-happy images showing Tommo and Marek visiting Maria in Paris. It's so trite that it makes you wonder if happiness is such a rare currency in Meadows's films because all he knows about the stuff is what he's seen in TV commercials.) Mostly, the film makes the audience happy, especially when Perry Benson is on-screen as Graham, the latest model in a current English movie tradition of heavyset, motor-mouthed characters who are part P. T. Barnum, part Fagin, and part affable, middle-aged big brother. (He introduces himself to Marek by giving him a jersey with the name of a local football team on it, urging him to pull it on over the jersey with the name of another team that he's already wearing, before somebody kills him over it. Both Graham and Marek proceed from this point under the shared assumption that this gesture has earned him Marek's indentured servitude.) And Thomas Turgoose remains a man to watch. After his performance as an inarticulate character in This Is England, Somers Town gives him the chance to work a wholly different set of muscles, and he's in clover in such moments here as the one where, having patiently listened to Marek insisting that Maria's his girlfriend even though they haven't kissed, he breaks it to his friend that that's just not how they do it in England.

The Screengrab : piotr jagiello

Tribeca 2008 Wraps Up

Tribeca Film Festival Review: Somers Town