Tribeca’s (Online) Film Festival this year is quite extensive: 6 feature films, 9 in-competition shorts and these—9 “retro” shorts from the festival’s past, all available for free! We’ll cover this year’s competition shorts in a series of forthcoming posts, but remember that Tribeca has their own spin on this online thing, so make sure to reserve a 24-hour screening window for each film in advance. These 9 retro shorts are a bit easier to manage, rather than signing up for specific 24-hour screening periods, they are available to view at any time between now and May 1st. If you miss them, I’ve included permanent YouTube/Vimeo links for many of the films. General impressions are mixed. I really like the multimedia strategy Tribeca has put together this year. It is a solid mix of creativity, multimedia approaches, interactivity and platform partnerships. However for the Streaming Room it must, in the end, come down to content, and I find the retro-shorts to be weaker than other festival’s online offerings. Sure I understand that many of these films are big award winners, I just don’t get why. The truly distressing aspect though is the lack of care in the image quality. Especially with these older generation shorts the interlacing issues are pretty bad, and there are even a few short films (Confession most egregiously) that look like they have aspect ratio issues. Yikes. Anyway, check out my mini-reviews below. Also follow along with updates via our Twitter handle @shortoftheweek or the hashtag #tribecashorts.

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short film imageWormhole: dir. Jessica Sharzer  | USA | 19min | 2002 “Wally decides to search for a wormhole that he believes will lead him back to his kidnapped brother but gives up in despair. His grandmother offers consolation: the concept of parallel universes.  In another universe, he and his brother are still together – THE WORMHOLE is his mind, his memory.” Won the Gold Medal at the Student Oscars while Sharzer was still at NYU,  but uninspired writing  consisting mainly of platitudes, coupled with a poor performance by the kid, sink an initially promising effort. 4/10 FESTIVAL LINK | PERMANENT LINK Confession: dir. Thomas Hefferon | Ireland | 4min | 2008 “Johnny Smith, a seemingly innocent local boy, goes to church to confess his sins to the all-powerful town priest and begins a strange conversation with the priest, who seems more interested in gossiping about the nocturnal habits of the local women than granting him absolution from his sins. But everything is not as it seems.” You should never spend 4 minutes to tell a single joke. 3/10 FESTIVAL LINK | PERMANENT LINK

short film imageNew Boy:dir. Steph Green | Ireland | 11min | 2007

“A young African boy with a haunting back story starts school in Ireland, and finds out quickly exactly what it means to be the new kid.”

This one is an internet success story with over 1.4 million views. We covered it when it was Oscar-nominated 2 years ago. Beautiful cinematography and above average performances augment a fairly run of the mill story.

7/10

FESTIVAL LINK | PERMANENT LINK

short film imageClear Cut, Simple: dir. Vineet Dewan | USA | 14min | 2007 “Based on a true story about an American soldier in Iraq who is torn between his duty to the military and his friendship with his Iraqi interpreter.” Nice. A modern war short film. A US soldier develops a bond with his translator that is tested when aspects of the translator’s past come to light. I’m not knowledgeable enough in military affairs to vouch for whether it is realistic or not, but from an emotional standpoint it colonizes a rich terrain with Trust/Betrayal. This is a USC student film, and leave it to them to blow the whole thing out, recreating the Middle East in Santa Clarita, renting military trucks and shooting on 35mm. It’s the kind of short film with professional aspirations that you don’t see make it onto the internet often. 7/10 FESTIVAL LINK | PERMANENT LINK short film imageTribe: dir: Tiffany Shlain | USA | 17min | 2005 “What do Barbie dolls and the history of the Jewish people have in common? Quite a lot, according to filmmaker Tiffany Shlain, whose documentary uses the doll’s Jewish inventor Ruth Handler as a jumping-off point for an 18-minute riff on the heretofore unseen connections between Jewish culture and Ken’s plastic girlfriend. Narrated by Peter Coyote, the film mixes archival footage, graphics, animation, Barbie dioramas, and slam poetry to tell two seemingly disparate histories that nevertheless converge in unexpected ways.” The film I wanted to see the most, a film I’ve wanted to see for over 5 years now, and of course it is the one that does not appear to be working. Will update with a review should the situation get sorted out. Updated 4/29:  The film is back online. My thoughts. The Tribe is a mess. It criss-crosses back upon itself numerous times. The focus is a half-hazard and the launching off point, Barbie, really has a pretty weak connection to where the film wants to go, and is abandoned unceremoniously half-way through. That said, it’s a hot mess. I really like the film. Its a scatterbrained work of fervent imagination that has scads more integrity, heart and gusto in its POV than all the rest of this program combined. The creative mix of found-footage, animations and performance is almost laugh-inducing sometimes in its amateurishness, but its certainly entertaining and effective, and it actually complements the fun, fast and tangential nature of this inspired screed. I’d like to see more of these actually, film essays that translate a filmmakers passion more directly. Shlain’s Howl is in a similar vein, I look forward to Connected. 8/10 FESTIVAL LINK short film imageDance Mania Fantastic: dir. Sasie Sealy | USA | 12min | 2004 “Out of work and unable to tell his family that he’s been fired, a young New Yorker of Japanese descent finds utopian escapism by spending his days and weeks at the local arcade on the Dance Mania Fantastic machine. He carelessly and blissfully lives in his fantasy world until reality eventually catches up with him.” A film or can go back and forth on. Its an interesting perspective to explore in a film, but a lot of elements are just sub-par. Plus I don’t know why short filmmakers seem to think its OK to have these inert, practically catatonic characters as their leads. This program as a whole suffers from some odd ideas on how to build characters. 5/10 FESTIVAL LINK short film imageOff Duty: dir. Buboo Kakati | USA | 15min | 2003 “Michael, the teenage son of a New York City cab driver, dreams of only one thing: gaining his father’s love and approval as he takes his first steps towards adolescence. As he rides through the Big Apple, balancing school and a job as a delivery boy, he learns about self-respect and rising above circumstances.” Another slowish film about feelings unsaid between members of the underclass. This one is pretty good though. It has genuine visual panache, a lyrical mix of well-composed shots with a lilting editing rhythm. Plus the emotions have real weight, nothing else in the program can match it, my favorite in the program. Buboo Kakati has gone on to win Emmys for her work on the PBS series, Secrets of New York. 8/10 FESTIVAL LINK short film imageSome Boys Don’t Leave: dir. Maggie Kiley | USA | 16min | 2009 “What happens when the breakup happens, but the break does not? ‘Boy’ is forced to come to terms with the fact that ‘Girl’ no longer wants him around. The only problem is, he just can’t seem to leave their once-shared apartment. Girl decides to keep living her life around him while he remains. In time, each decides to go in distinctly different directions. Or do they?” I remember this one from festivals. It didn’t play that well to the audience I was in, which is a shame. It’s a very unique film, and there is a sensitivity towards the male-female gender battles that is refreshing.  However I think the film misleads viewers,  tricking them into thinking it’s a comedy and then into thinking that it’s plot-driven—that some sort of epiphany or resolution is forthcoming.  Neither really arrives.  The premise is sound, though it is a sort of “hit you over the head” metaphor—exchanging an emotional inability to “move on” with a physical refusal to “move on”—but while Jesse Eisenberg’s wonderful performance, allowed me to feel his plight, there is a difference between describing an emotion, and telling a story with emotion, that talented writer/director Maggie Kiley might need to work on still. 6/10 FESTIVAL LINK | PERMANENT LINK short film imageGowanus, Brooklyn: dir Ryan Fleck | USA | 19min |2004 “Drey is a 12-year-old Brooklyn girl who discovers her teacher smoking crack after school and is compelled to investigate further. First-time actress Shareeka Epps brings uncommon assurance to her role as Drey, a tomboy whose experiences kindle a newfound fascination with the complicated adult world.” This is an iconic work in a certain vein of New York storytelling, what A.O. Scott calls neo-neorealism. Every year I see several NYU or Columbia U short films that pay a debt to this work. I’ve never placed it on SotW because, unfortunately, its just not that enjoyable to watch. Long, with a ton of lengthy held shots, that the actors just don’t seem to know what to do with. I think the short’s reputation has been boosted in retrospect by the FABULOUS feature adaptation Ryan Fleck and film partner Anna Boden pulled off, Half Nelson. 5/10 FESTIVAL LINK | PERMANENT LINK