The 2024 Tribeca Festival (Web Exclusive)
by Will DiGravio

While watching Christy Hall’s Daddio, an adaptation of her play of the same name featuring Sean Penn as a taxi driver and Dakota Johnson as his passenger, my lower back began to grow warm. It seemed my body was having a visceral reaction to the film, all of which takes place in a single cab ride from JFK International Airport to the Manhattan apartment of Johnson’s character, billed as Girlie. But as the heat grew more intense, I soon realized that I had, in fact, inadvertently turned on the seat warmer, a feature of the leather loungers at the AMC theater on 19th Street, just north of Union Square in Manhattan, the filmic hub of the Tribeca Festival (“Film” was dropped from its name in 2020). 

That for a moment my body had tricked itself into believing it was in an intense cab ride of its own speaks to the immersive quality of Hall’s film. Daddio begins with Girlie arriving at JFK and opening her phone to a series of increasingly annoying messages from her drunk boyfriend, who is more interested in meeting for a hook-up than the details of her trip. Girlie continues texting him as she gets in the cab driven by a man named Clark (Penn), unaware that a consequential conversation will soon ensue. Dialogue-heavy adaptations of stage plays for the screen are often cinematically unsuccessful. In discussing Dial M for Murder (1954), Hitchcock told Truffaut that the challenge in adapting such works was to “open it up,” so as to avoid the feeling that one had merely filmed a live performance of the play in question. Hall certainly succeeds in this regard.

Clark begins by bemoaning a bygone era, when passengers tipped well (and with cash), opting to spend the ride chatting rather than staring at a screen. Girlie leans into the conversation, bantering with him about the realities of contemporary life. Their discussion grows more personal as their levels of trust and comfort ebb and flow. At first, Clark is a bit too judgmental and mansplain-y, especially when he presses Girlie to reflect on her romantic choices and, in turn, offer his own sage wisdom. But then the film flips, as Girlie opens up and gets Clark to do the same. Hall and cinematographer Phedon Papamichael shoot the pair from seemingly every angle of the cab. As the tête-à-tête grows more intense, so, too, do the camera angles. The driver-client partition lowers and their mutual trust rises. Penn gives a solid performance, but it is Johnson who makes the film, especially with her eyes. They move about the cab, through the window, into Clark’s, and, at times, down to her phone. Despite Clark’s critique of modern cell phone usage, Daddio serves as one of the most successful examples yet of texting in cinema—in the cab, the texts represent the reality to which Girlie had just returned, secrets that, in failing to fully hide them, come to shape the conversation within. 

There is a certain irony that a film dealing directly with the distractedness that defines so much of twenty-first-century life emerged as one of the more publicized films from the festival. Since ditching “Film” from its name, Tribeca has grown into a showcase for the myriad forms of storytelling with which one might engage in a given day: video games, television, music, audio narratives, and immersive experiences by way of artificial intelligence are just some of the ways that Tribeca has chosen to lean into our fractured, multimedia moment. This year’s festivities also featured [Robert] De Niro Con, a celebration of the famous actor who co-founded the festival in 2003. The festivities included film screenings, panel conversations with his collaborators, and even “The De Niro Hero,” a tasting competition between bodegas and shops in the city that offer sandwiches named after him. The only throughline of all these events may be the red carpet(s), which served well the influencer culture the festival has so clearly tried to cultivate. 

But let us return to the art of conversation, which manifests differently from Daddio in Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes, an archival documentary drawn from hours of interview tape-recorded with the performer in 1964. Nearly all the film is told in Taylor’s voice, providing a useful—and refreshing—take on one of the most documented celebrity lives of the twentieth century. Director Nanette Burstein avoids the cliched talking-head format, opting instead to spend maximum time with Taylor, giving the audience a chance to not merely hear her talk but also to sit with her as she pauses, thinks, refines, and reflects on her life. In doing so, The Lost Tapes partially acts as a corrective, giving Taylor the chance to rebuke those who saw her as only a star, not an artist. 

Burstein and writer Tal Ben-David, who also edited the film, accompany the archival audio with home movies, newsreels, and movie clips that transcend illustrative functions to capture the genius of her work as a performer (“I love the possibility of acting”), the complexities of her private life (“I know myself, and I know I will try and get away with murder”), and how her intimate moments became fodder for lies and exaggerations in the press and public imagination (“I think some part of me is sorry I became a public utility”). Beyond her craft, Taylor also reflects on the many tragic losses in her life, including James Dean and her third husband, Mike Todd. “It was the first time,” she says of the too-brief marriage, “I had ever been happy.” The Lost Tapes (which is now available to stream on HBO) wisely assumes that viewers will arrive to the film and Taylor’s story with varying degrees of familiarity. Even those who came of age following Taylor’s life and work will be entranced by her voice and the film’s careful and engaging treatment of it. 

They All Came Out to Montreux makes use of a far different, though no less engaging archive: the audiovisual recordings spanning more than a half century of the Montreux Jazz Festival. That the festival played host to the live recording of “Compared to What” by Les McCann and Eddie Harris would be enough to secure the festival’s place in music history. But Claude Nobs, who started the festival in the 1960s, kept going. Nina Simone, Ella Fitzgerald, David Bowie, Miles Davis, and the band Deep Purple, who chronicled a 1971 fire at the festival in their song, “Smoke on the Water,” are just a few of the performers Nobs brought to his Swiss hometown. The film chronicles Nobs’s relentless efforts to build the festival into one of the premiere venues—and refuges—in the world for artists and their work. Writer-director Oliver Murray dips into a more conventional biographical mode when discussing Nobs, but the film then becomes a tribute to his life and work in the best way: showing his impact through the rich footage Nobs both organized into being and meticulously archived. 

In today’s cinema landscape, never has there been so fertile a soil for archival documentary. Streaming services are warring for content. And, as time marches on and cameras grow more ubiquitous, raw footage abounds. Among the most promising outcomes of this trend is the possibility that private archives, such as that of the Montreux Jazz Festival, whose archive was kept professionally stored in Nobs’s home, will move into the public eye. They All Came Out to Montreux ends by bringing the camera into Nobs’s home and teasing the archival riches within. The film is part of a broader effort to make the archive more accessible—a promise one hopes will be fulfilled. This meta turn elevates the film beyond the festival, inviting reflection on the possibilities of democratizing cultural history through film and technology, for we are at just the beginning of such efforts. 

The archive functions differently yet again in Elizabeth Sankey’s Witches, the standout film from the festival. Using cinematic depictions of witches and actual testimonials from historical events as launching pads and throughlines—like the Salem Witch Trials, for example—Sankey, who wrote, edited, and directed the film, unpacks the realities of postpartum depression through a series of interviews with women and by sharing her own experience. Sankey also acts as narrator, performer, interviewer, and interviewee, weaving together hundreds of years’ worth of stories and collapsing them into a multipronged narrative that masterfully balances the historical with the personal, elevating experiences that are at some moments hopeful, and at others devastating. 

At times, Witches plays like a video essay, analyzing depictions of witches and mothers in the movies. At other moments, Witches recalls the essay film tradition, taking on a more explicitly political tone in addressing the patriarchal systems that stigmatize postpartum depression and motherhood more generally. And it is also a deeply personal, reflective documentary, in which Sankey interviews members of an online community of mothers who aided her through the post pregnancy period. This blend of modes makes Witches a dense, yet moving and accessible film. 

Taboo and systemic discrimination feature in another festival standout, the scripted Crossing. Directed by Levan Akın, the film centers on an unlikely pair: the retired teacher, Lia (Mzia Arabuli), and a young adult longing to get out of his small town in the nation of Georgia, Achi (Lucas Kankava). Lia meets Achi while looking for her transgender niece, Tekla, who had previously been ostracized from the family. The tough, quiet Lia does her best to mask emotions, but it is clear her search for Tekla comes from a mix of deep love and guilt. Achi tells Lia that Tekla has left Georgia for Istanbul. After much begging, Lia allows Achi to accompany her to Turkey, a deal that will result in a friendship derived from each person’s feelings of loss and loneliness.

Though set against the backdrop of tragedy and personal grief, Akin’s film creates a tremendous atmosphere as the duo search the streets of Istanbul, making time to experience the nightlife of the city. They dance. They dine. They fight. They laugh. The two also encounter a vibrant community of transgender women, many of whom once knew Tekla. Lia’s search for Tekla provides a strong emotional arc to the film, but it is the subplot, her budding friendship between the restless but caring Achi that makes for a deeply human depiction of how one can find companionship even in moments of intense hopelessness. 

Guilt and desperation play out, too, in Vulcanizadora, the latest from independent filmmaker Joel Potrykus. A pair of male acquaintances, Derek, played by the writer-director, and Marty (Joshua Burge), travel together through the woods of their youth, stopping along the way to camp, drink, and dig up old porno magazines stashed by their teenage selves decades earlier. Encased in the trappings of a hangout movie à la Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy (2006), for example, Vulcanizadora quickly subverts our expectations as the duo continue their march through the trees and make awkward conversation. Derek’s enthusiasm for the trip, including the gadgets and toys he brings to pass the time, soon manifests in a manic expression. Marty is a much darker figure, brooding and sulking all the way, desperate to reach their final destination. 

Potrykus, who also wrote and edited the film, shot Vulcanizadora on 16mm. The grain of the image captures in stunning detail the dreary trappings of the forest and the domestic ones of Marty’s drearier life in Grand Rapids, the director’s hometown. Vulcanizadora captures not merely the capriciousness of life, but that very masculine impulse for complete control, even in the most despairing of circumstances. What they intend to do once they reach their endpoint soon becomes clear, culminating in a devastating, painful scene for viewer and character alike. 

Finally, a word on Mike Ott’s McVeigh, a minimalist portrait of Timothy McVeigh (Alfie Allen), the man who, along with Terry Nichols (Brett Gelman), were the main perpetrators of the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing. In McVeigh, the character billed only as Tim spends most of his time on the road. He practices at the shooting range with Terry; sets up a table selling mostly bumper stickers at local gun shows; and visits white supremacist Richard Snell (Tracy Letts), who was then on death row for having murdered a pawn shop owner he wrongly believed was Jewish, and then later a Black police officer. The upshot: the film depicts a man caught up in the burgeoning, far right activity of the United States in the 1990s. During this period, extremists were activated by two events in particular: the 1992 standoff at Ruby Ridge and then, on April 19, 1993, the failed siege of the Branch Davidian compound by law enforcement in Waco, Texas. 

McVeigh makes basic, on-the-nose references to this phenomenon. Early in the film, Tim holds up a gun to the television as then-Attorney General Janet Reno testifies to Congress about the failures at Waco. He attends a cookout where a woman washes dishes, and the camera not-so-subtly reveals a swastika tattooed on her arm. And he chats regularly with Snell, who shares that his execution is scheduled to take place on April 19, 1995, an obvious message, he says, from the government. But like Alex Garland’s recent, reprehensible film, Civil War, McVeigh avoids a meaningful examination of the ideology at the core of the bombing plot. Instead, it is far more concerned with aestheticizing the life and trappings of McVeigh and his co-conspirators, dramatizing his sociopathic tendencies without engaging the movements and writings that fueled his work as a white supremacist and anti-government extremist. 

Most odd is the romantic subplot of the film. Ashley Benson plays a woman named Cindy, with whom Tim begins a casual relationship. It later ends when she enters a room without permission, and he verbally abuses her. Soon after, they run into each other at the local bar. They say hello and he, after she asks whether there is anything he would like to say, does not apologize. Cindy angrily walks away. The awkward scene seemingly aspires to show McVeigh’s misogyny and sociopathic tendencies. But it is, in fact, one example of how the film privileges hollow affect over actual substance. Historians have traced the clear extremist roots that run from the 1990s (and earlier) to our current political moment, including the militia groups that mobilized on January 6, 2021. Depending on how familiar the audience is with this history and context, the insubstantial depiction rendered in the film is a selective telling at best, ahistorical and harmful at worst. The film ends with a found footage montage of the bombing and aftermath, sped up to once again create a cheap sensation. The montage, though, only seeks to empower the worst implications of the drama: that it is of the past and thus free of its political weight, not beholden to the world in which the very ideology depicted still lives and thrives. 

When the Tribeca Festival decided to remove “film” from the title, it shifted to swim upstream with our society, one in which cinema no longer dominates the cultural milieu. But what the filmic portion of this year’s festival showed, even in the works that did not curry favor with this reviewer, is that the art form itself remains as lively as ever, even if one must cut through figurative and literal traffic to get there. And in that, there is certainly much to celebrate. 

Will DiGravio, a Cineaste assistant editor, is a Brooklyn-based critic and researcher.

For further information on the Tribeca Festival, visit here.

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Cineaste, Vol.  XLIX, No. 4