The History

April 24th marks the kick-off of the fifth annual Tribeca Film Festival. The festival’s roots, planted in lower Manhattan and sown in the aftermath of September 11th, breathe life into a region struggling to define memorial and in a city with a legacy of dynamism and contemporary thought. What can be more dynamic than returning to the site to view the newest creations on screen?

While architectural and sculptural memorials have come to distasteful standstills, the festival celebrates its fifth year in what film auteurs are expecting to be heavy, politically motivated films ripe with commentary about the first years of the century. Woefully short on the line-up is the abstract, the cynical, or the outright embrace of sugary concoctions. The undertones of urgency may be here today, and gone tomorrow, yet through it all the festival encourages the a mix of thoughts and styles that will never force memory into dated stasis.

I would love to say that current planning and implementation lapses at the World Trade Center site are the consequence of ambitious visions of keeping the event open to evolving discourse decades from now, or the architectural squabbles are due to meticulous planning for research, educational, and community centers adjoining the site’s memorial. Now, I’m not caught up on all the daily memorial squabbles, but I get the sense that somewhere along the way there were some unintended detours.

But not for Tribeca, which opened its doors with small numbers and boomed into one of the largest household names in the American festival calendar. Every year has witnessed different tones and selections of new works. Every year thousands, and then tens of thousands of avid film fans have returned to the island’s southern tip and tinged its memory with hopes of the new and the fresh; the escapist and the rabble-rousing; the quiet and the loud. People do not forget where they stand, but they bring with themselves their expectations and critiques of each passing frame.

It is a powerful combination that transcends any one film, or any one groups’ reactions to a film. The action and opposite reaction all affect the moment and their traces will be felt in distant years both in the film industry and the local lower Manhattan landscape. There are many exhibitions and performances that speak to 9/11 each year, but none that has the same reach and mass as the fledgling film festival. The mainstream experiences it, and for good or bad determines it future just as this country experienced trauma and will for good or bad determine its future. There is flexibility in annual programming where both the ephemeral and long-lasting will speak to 9/11’s evolving discourse (or lack thereof).

There is a comfort in this dynamism, which rarely radiates from dated, manipulative or conservative stone sculptures. Tribeca may be conservative today and liberal next year, and by the following year our views on what determines the social spectrum may have flipped the previous years’ categorizations. The many feet that tread Tribeca’s grounds may come for the location or maybe just to see a movie, but they ensure an unpredictable energy be assigned to the neighborhood. There is no one way to experience a festival, and even the typical expectations tourists may come with fall in the face of accidental discoveries.

Film selection may one year be attacked for its shallowness and irrelevancy only to be considered irrelevant and blatantly political the following year. Yet a third year shallow escapism and/or posturing social commentary may be discussed in light of relevancy, craft and power.

Festivals will always be the flagship sites of industry, economy, education and entertainment, and the Tribeca Film Festival is no exception. The jewels of this festival however, are in its founding mission and sensitive location, both of which help to create rich material for cinema historiography, and ensure the continuation of a true living memory.