Cynematik • Cyndi Greening

BY CYNDI GREENING, ARIZONA, USA – This year, Tribeca will screen 159 feature films and 85 shorts selected from 4,550 film submissions, of which 2,250 were feature film submissions. The films come from 41 countries including Argentina, Armenia, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Croatia, Cuba, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, Mali, Mexico, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, Russia, Serbia, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, Tunisia, Turkey, U.K., and Ukraine. Eighteen narrative features and 16 documentary features will compete for cash prizes totalling $100,000. The Spotlight section presents a combination of both narrative and documentary films that were created by noted filmmakers.

Reading through the film descriptions for Tribeca, the film that leapt off the page was HALF MOON, a film by Bahman Ghobadi. One of my favorite films of all times is a Ghobadi film, A TIME FOR DRUNKEN HORSES. His newest film took the Golden Shell at the San Sebastian Film Festival. It is summarized as “the story of Mamo, a famed Kurdish musician who obtains permission to cross the Iranian border to give his first concert in Iraqi Kurdistan. But the journey poses endless challenges, especially when he tries to bring a female singer from Iran, where performances by women have been silenced since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.”

Another film that excites me is Jia Zhang-Ke’s STILL LIFE. The film is drama about a Yangtze town that will soon be submerged by the Three Gorges Dam. Like the director’s other films (PLATFORM, UNKNOWN PLEASURES, THE WORLD), it’s an empathetic portrait of those left behind by a modernizing society, and a unique hybrid of documentary and fiction.