Amy Taubin on the 2023 Tribeca Festival

DURING A SCREENING of the most exciting film I’ve seen at the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival, Edmundo Bejarano’s melody of love, one of the programmers explained to the audience that even though the word “film” had been dropped from the title of the festival, the films remained its heart. Well, yes and no. Much like the Sundance Film Festival, Tribeca has gradually expanded its scope to include a VR program, this year titled “Games and Immersive Experience,” which, along with live music, is the festival’s biggest draw. “Games and Immersive Experience” took place at the lavish Spring Studios on Varick Street, as did some of the music showcases. There were also music programs with movies at the Apollo, The Beacon, Borough of Manhattan Community College Auditorium, and Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn. It’s not exactly a new strategy – the festival has been expanding its geographical reach for at least a decade. But for the first time, it felt like the movies were seriously looked down upon. Why would anyone want to go to crazy multiplexes like AMC Nineteenth Street or Angelika’s Village East to see a movie you know nothing about when all the cool people are at Spring Studios listening a conversation between Steven Soderbergh and David Fincher, who were guaranteed smart, witty and informative? (They were.) And while it’s a bonus that the festival has brought filmmakers from around the world to present and do Q&As at their screenings, that’s what independent theaters like Metrograph, Film Forum, Anthology and Film at Lincoln Center are now using it as a decoy to drive viewers away from their home screens. What is unique to Tribeca is that its programmers engage in films whose directors have not been certified by the festival establishment. This year there were at least half a dozen uncut gems. I wish they received the settings they deserved.

melody of love, a magnificent micro-budget film that turns the usual migration narrative on its head, reflects the experience of its director, Edmundo Bejarano, and Carlos Vargas, its cinematographer and producer. Bejarano and Vargas, who grew up in Bolivia and Colombia respectively, met in a German class in Berlin some 20 years ago. In 2015, Bejarano produced a fifty-minute portrait of poet Julio Barriga which won the International Critics Award at the Buenos Aires Independent Film Festival. A few years later, during a trip to Addis Ababa, he fell in love with the city and the music of Mulatu Astatke, the master of Ethio-jazz. His feature debut is a delightful tribute to the city. The story is simple: Michael (Elijah Reid) has three days to say goodbye to a place where, for the first time in his life, he felt at home. Through bits of dialogue, we learn that Michael is Ethiopian, that his family moved to Brussels when he was young, that he hated living in Europe, and that now his mother has asked him to abandon his new life in Addis and return to Brussels to help her and her sister. We see and, just as vividly, we hear Addis through Michael’s ears: Astatke’s music mixed with the pouring rain, the traffic, the whispers of a couple in bed. melody of love is a film rich in sensuality, but it is also the reflection of a divided conscience. Edited from ominously colored still shots, most lasting less than thirty seconds, the film reveals Michael’s dilemma through their bifurcated compositions. Even in Addis, Michael feels like he’s in two places at once. Many of the films I saw in Tribeca had progressive “messages” embedded in banal or thoughtless film language. The program notes for Bejarano’s film call it “experimental” but it is neither more nor less than that of Apichatpong Weerasethakul Memory or Tsai Ming-Liang Goodbye Dragon Inn. It’s a work of art. (It airs on “Tribeca at Home” through July 2.)

If there was a movie more entertaining than Bryian Keith Montgomery Jr.’s feature debut, Cinnamon, well, I missed it. Winner of the Grand Prize at the Miami Black American Film FestivalCinnamon grafts Blaxploitation tropes onto a Tarantino-like looping time structure, but unlike recent Tarantino films, Cinnamon packs its riotous action into ninety-one minutes. Hailey Kilgore as a gas station attendant awaiting a singing career and a little too cavalier about how she’s going to finance it and Pam Grier as a towering figure of headache with a together that works in perfect sync, even when their criminal plans fail at every turn. But the Tribeca fiction film that won four major awards failed as both art and entertainment. A Covid lockdown psychodrama set in Brazil, Guto Parente’s A strange path is also a kind of horror film about the displacement and estrangement of a son from his father and his country. Emotionally honest but naive about form and overly reliant on a big reveal at the end, the movie left me feeling terrible with no particular ending.

As usual, documentaries are better choices in Tribeca than fiction. Two of the best were Monica Villamizar and Jordan Bryon Transition and David Gutnik Two walls rule. The latter film is set in Ukraine and is notable for its depiction of how people go about their daily lives knowing that at any moment they will be attacked. Two walls rule doesn’t hesitate to show both pleasure and pain (the title refers to the safest space if you don’t have time to get to a designated underground air-raid shelter). The directors of photography, Gutnik and Volodymyr Ivanov, photograph the destruction not only of the buildings but of the bodies, burned and dismembered, and the most extraordinary thing about the film is that we understand how necessary it is that they show us precisely what is going on in this war on ordinary people who could have been at their jobs or watching movies like we were in Tribeca. The central character of Transition is one of the directors. Bryon, an Australian TV filmmaker, is a trans man who was on a mission in Afghanistan when he started taking hormone injections and planning surgery. With the Taliban takeover, this situation has become increasingly dangerous for him and his colleagues. And it also put him in the unethical position of hiding who he was from his subjects. If that sounds like a narcissistic adventure, it’s not. Yes, Bryon has options while women in Afghanistan don’t. But his loyalty to the project of documenting the transition to Taliban rule when he was literally in danger of losing his mind is both absurd and courageous.

A Word About Hideo Kojima: The Supposedly Breakthrough Game Creator (I’m Not A Gamer) Appeared In Person After The Documentary Hideo Kojima: Connecting Worlds. Almost unforgivable hagiographic (and apparently made by Kojima’s company, as there were no other credits), it nevertheless had a useful moment when Kojima explained that his inspirations all came from the movies. He named David Cronenberg, David Lynch, Stanley Kubrick. The powers that be in Tribeca could be doing future game makers a favor by keeping the films at the heart of the festival.

— Amy Taubin

The 2023 Tribeca Festival ran from June 7-18.