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 Reviews: "Pray the Devil Back to Hell"; "Fire Under the Snow"; "Milosovic on Trial"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 02 May 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Some of the documentaries at Tribeca this year feel like messages in a bottle sent from the recent past, efforts at preserving material that will be useful to those who eventually write the definitive histories. Pray to Send the Devil Back to Hell is a mixture of old news footage and fresh interviews dealing with the fifteen years of chaos and carnage that followed the declaration of civil war in Liberia in 1989. Ragged as the movie is, it makes for an inspiring viewing experience, and its tribute to the "women's peace movement" of Liberia succeeds in taking something that, at the time, may have seemed like a footnote to the big events and making the case that it was instrumental in bringing about many of the happier developments in this story. The women's peace movement grew out of the escalating sense of hopelessness that developed as President Charles Taylor and the "warlords" jockeying to replace him both used violent terror as their main tool in their battle for power. Things finally got bas enough that the Christian and Muslim women of Liberia, for the first time in their history, joined forces to campaign for peace through public protests and more intimate strategies, such as what one of them calls "sex strikes." The campaigners betray no hesitation in declaring themselves the representatives of peace by virtue of their gender, and united as a group against men, who they regard as "guilty" of supporting violence "either by commission or omission." As they see it, the men are the ones with the power in their society, and if they didn't want the bloodshed to continue, they could do something to stop it. Instead, they've used their power to bring war--and to approve the use of rape as a weapon in warfare.

Eventually, the popular support their movement picked up forced Taylor and the warlords to the bargaining table and helped set in motion the chain of events that eventually landed Taylor in U.N. custody, where he's currently being tried for war crimes. In his absence, the warlords gathered to hammer out a peace agreement, though some began to feel that the proceedings were being needlessly prolonged because the participants enjoyed the hotel accommodations they were given after years of sleeping on the ground in a war zone. Finally, Leymah Gbowee, the co-ordinator of the women's peace movement, marched her troops into the hallways and kick-started the process by having a tearful, screaming fit. The movie has its share of horror stories about what went on during the war, but nothing else so dramatically conveys what it must have been like to live in Liberia during that time as the sight of Leymah Gbowee, who is radiant and serenely composed in the new interview footage, having an angry, sobbing meltdown--the last desperate resort of someone who's already done so much against such insurmountable odds that this last stupid roadblock has her ready to pop her cork and spew lava. Always slow to recognize an invaluable resource when it's fallen into their laps, the male security forces first asked the women to leave, then asked if some of them could help them tackle the delegates who had started trying to escape the premises by jumping out the windows. The film ends with a jubilant sense of accomplishment. "We campaigned until the end of the night," recalls one smiling woman. "We campaigned until we forgot that we could be raped!"

Another documentary, Fire Under the Snow, records the heroism of Palder Gyatso, a Tibetan monk who spent 33 years in Chinese custody, enduring starvation and torture until he managed to escape the country in 1992. This one, which draws its quiet power from its subject's on-screen demonstration of same, is moving and ends more or less happily but with an undertone of sad resignation: its hero now lives in India as a free man, but is a living symbol of someone who cannot return home. The title character of Milosovic on Trial, the former Serbian president and, one imagines, possible future roommate of Charles Taylor's, ultimately failed to live long enough to see a verdict delivered in the war crimes trial that he did so much to pointlessly prolong, his death of natural causes in his cell having denied the world to chance to see him bust a move at the end of a rope. Milosovic's trial was a footnote to the story of war and genocide in the Balkans at the end of the twentieth century, and Milosovic on Trial, an admirably solid, straightforward, public-television-style summing-up, doesn't pretend to be more than that. It benefits greatly from its footage of Milosovic in the dock, putting in his bid to be remembered as the ideal face of arrogant, rock-stupid-and-proud-of-it institutional villainy. With his thick, smirking face and shock of white hair, he looks like the malignant love child of Archie Bunker and Elmer Fudd, and this does not seem inappropriate to either his character or his place in history. One witness who describes a moment when Milosovic told him that he didn't believe in the existence of the piece of paper that the man was waving in his face at the time says that it was his impression that the top Serb felt that "if he said something, that made it true." Thank God such blind idiot faith in one's own self-serving horseshit is unknown in our own corridors of power. The other big revelation in the film is that all the lawyers who work on war crimes trials appear to have awful-looking teeth. Whatever draws people to this difficult, frustrating line of work, it can't be that the the U.N. has such a terrific dental plan.

The Screengrab : pray the devil back to hell

Tribeca 2008 Wraps Up

Tribeca Film Festival Reviews: "Pray the Devil Back to Hell"; "Fire Under the Snow"; "Milosovic on Trial"