The 24 Must-See Movies We Can’t Wait To Watch at the 2018 Tribeca Film Fest
Source: Tribeca Film Festival
Source: Tribeca Film Festival Press Center
With the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival right around the corner, Danielle A. Scruggs shares the films, stars and concepts that we can’t wait to watch.
With 96 movies from 103 filmmakers showing at the 17th annual Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, we are ecstatic for the changes in diversity and inclusion happening on the independent circuit.
READ: 'Scarface' Turns 35 This Year, So Come See It At The 2018 Tribeca Film Festival
Did you know: 46 percent of the films submitted are by women? There are a ton of subjects, genres, stars and concepts to choose from, so much so that it could all be overwhelming to the average cinemagoer.
Don’t worry, though, we got you.
We have compiled a pretty thorough list of 24 movies that have intriguing concepts that are worth checking out throughout the run of the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival.
Source: Tribeca Film Festival
Blowin’ Up
When a woman leaves her pimp, it’s called “blowin’ up.” In this documentary, director Stephanie Wang-Breal examines an experimental court in Queens that provides counseling sessions that encourage women brought in on prostitution-and human trafficking-related charges to exit the life. The film traces the ups and downs the women face during the sessions as well as the circumstances that led these vulnerable women into prostitution.
Source: Tribeca Film Festival
Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes
I’m a jazz head so a documentary about one of the most important record labels in music, Blue Note Records, is something that I have to see. (Fun Fact: the Blue Notes logo inspired the original Okayplayer logo as well.)
Blue Note Records was home to some of the most influential musicians in jazz, including Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Bud Powell, Art Blakey, and Eric Dolphy, and is home to present-day artists like José James, Ambrose Akinmusire and Norah Jones.
The documentary traces the history of Blue Note, from its founding to its latter-day Renaissance, through archival photos and interviews with the label’s alums and fans including Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Rudy van Gelder, and Robert Glasper.
Source: Tribeca Film Festival
Call Her Ganda
Call Her Ganda tells the story of a transgender Filipina woman who was brutally murdered and left in a motel room in the Philippines in 2014. When a U.S. Marine was identified as the primary suspect, it sparked protests and legal action, revealing undercurrents of transphobia, militarism, and ongoing post-colonial tensions between the United States and the Philippines.
Source: Tribeca Film Festival
Charm City
Director Marilyn Ness takes us into some of the toughest neighborhoods in Baltimore during a three-year period of unparalleled violence. Baltimore’s situation represents insight into the distrust between civilians and police officers that have been fostered by decades of police and institutional violence. But it is also a look at the vibrancy of the city as well.
On a personal note, I lived in Baltimore when I attended graduate school at MICA and I found it to be one of the most beautiful cities I have ever lived in. And it was made beautiful by the complete lack of pretension of the people of the city. I was excited to see a documentary on the roster that seems like it will highlight the particular rough hewn beauty of the city.
Source: Tribeca Film Festival
Dead Women Walking
Dead Women Walking traces the final days of a series of women on death row, from two weeks before one inmate’s execution to mere minutes before another’s. This film co-stars Moonlight ’s Ashton Sanders as the teenage son of one of the women who is imprisoned. Like O.G. and It’s a Hard Truth, Ain’t It, this story traces the human toll of mass incarceration and the enforcement of the death penalty.
Source: Tribeca Film Festival
Love, Gilda
Gilda Radner was one of the vivacious original cast members of the cultural comedy institution Saturday Night Live. This documentary uses personal recordings and journal entries to tell the story of Radner most people do not know: her struggles with success, fame, relationships, and battle with ovarian cancer.
Source: Tribeca Film Festival
It's a Hard Truth, Ain't It
It’s a Hard Truth, Ain’t It follows 13 incarcerated men imprisoned at the Pendelton Correctional Facility in Indiana. Over a weeklong workshop inside the prison, filmmaker Madeleine Sackler, who also directed O.G., a drama inspired by the work she did on this documentary, introduces the inmates to the art of filmmaking and encourages them to tell their stories through this powerful medium.
Source: Tribeca Film Festival
Little Woods
Ollie (Tessa Thompson) is barely making ends meet in her small, economically depressed, town in North Dakota. After she is reunited with her estranged sister, the two face mounting personal and financial pressures that leave Ollie with an impossible choice: returning to an illegal prescription pill selling scheme or leaving everything, including her family behind.
This film marks the feature film debut of writer-director Nia DaCosta. I’m intrigued by this movie not only because it’s work by a black woman director (who are still ridiculously under-represented in Hollywood) but also because it centers on working-class struggles that black people are facing in rural America.
Photo Credit: Chifoumi Productions
M
Lila, has a speech impediment that renders her nearly mute in front of strangers. Mo is a drag racer and baker, who has a secret: he can barely read or write. A chance meeting ignites a potential romance for two people from different worlds—if they can just find a way to communicate.
Source: Tribeca Film Festival
McQueen
McQueen tells the story of famed fashion designer Alexander McQueen, who tragically took his own life in 2010. The documentary will feature his personal archives and interviews with his friends and family, charting his rise in the fashion world and the creative process behind his provocative designs.
Source: Tribeca Film Festival
Mr. SOUL!
This documentary offers us a look at the groundbreaking TV variety and performance show SOUL!, which showcased black music, dance, and literature from 1968 to 1973.
Source: Tribeca Film Festival
Nigerian Prince
Troubled American teenager Eze is sent away to his mother’s native Nigeria and gets entangled in scams and corruptions thanks to his con-artist cousin Pius. Nigerian Prince was shot on location in Lagos and finished in less than a year, after filmmaker Faraday Okoro was awarded the inaugural AT&T Untold Stories rant in 2017.
Source: Tribeca Film Festival
O.G.
Jeffrey Wright is one the most exciting and compelling actors working today, so I am excited to see him star in O.G. as Louis, a prison inmate who has spent 24 years in prison and is set to be released soon. Filmed on location in an actual maximum-security prison with inmates participating as actors, the film explores the complexities of life as an incarcerated man in America. And given that America imprisons 2.3 million people with another 4 million people on probation, this movie looks to be a timely examination of the effects of mass incarceration on an individual life.
Source: Tribeca Film Festival
Phantom Cowboys
This film follows a group of teenage boys across America as they transition from boyhood to adulthood. Director Daniel Patrick Carbone revisits the young men he filmed three years earlier in his film Hide Your Smiling Faces to see how their lives and goals have changed. It looks reminiscent of the British documentary Up Series, where a documentary film crew revisits the kids they first interviewed in 1964 every seven years as they grow into adolescence and adulthood.
Photo Credit: Allison Joyce / Getty Images
Rest in Power: The Trayvon Martin Story
Executive produced by Jay-Z, Rest In Power: The Trayvon Martin Story depicts the all-too-brief life and legacy of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old boy murdered by George Zimmerman in 2012. His death and Zimmerman’s subsequent acquittal kicked off a political movement that have far-reaching effects to this day.
Source: Tribeca Film Festival
Say Her Name: The Life and Death of Sandra Bland
All too often, black women are left out of the conversations around police violence; that is the reason why the #SayHerName hashtag appeared after Sandra Bland, a Black Lives Matter activist who was due to start a new job, died in police custody in 2015, ostensibly by suicide. This documentary examines the circumstances around her mysterious death and her family’s search for answers in the two years following her death. Given the epidemic-levels of police killings in America, this documentary looks to be a timely and necessary examination of the criminal justice system and the twin injustices of racism and misogyny.
Source: Tribeca Film Festival
Shorts Program - Into My Life
From 1965 to the present, M. Elaine and Cassandra Bromfield, two black women, shot their in Brooklyn’s Lindsay Park Housing Cooperative on 8mm film. I am obsessed with archival footage and photographs of everyday black life and the ideas of memories and creating a record of yourself for future generations to explore.
Source: Tribeca Film Festival
Sunday's Illness
One evening after a dinner party, a woman is confronted by a member of the catering staff who turns out to be the child she abandoned 30 years prior. The daughter requests that they spend 10 days together in a remote house and then she will leave her alone forever. I am a sucker for a good mother-daughter drama and this film seems to fit the bill perfectly.
Source: Tribeca Film Festival
The Feeling of Being Watched
“The grey area between paranoia and the truth is a dangerous place,” says filmmaker Assia Boundaoui at the outset of The Feeling of Being Watched. Boundaoui tracks an FBI surveillance program in her hometown of Bridgeview, Illinois, a predominantly Arab-American suburb of Chicago to find out why her family and neighbors were targeted. While it’s been a popular running joke on social media to talk about how we’re being watched by personally assigned FBI agents (laugh to keep from crying, right?), she also examines the effects that this constant surveillance has on her community’s relationship with law enforcement and with each other.
Source: Tribeca Film Festival
The Gospel According to André
In this documentary, we’re treated to the origin story of one of the most well-known and respected people in the fashion world: tastemaker André Leon Talley, who served as Vogue’s news director, creative director, and editor-at-large, until 2013. You might also remember him from his unforgettable turn as a guest judge on America’s Next Top Model where he made his debut in 2010 during cycle 14. Talley takes us to childhood in Jim Crow-era North Carolina, where his grandmother schooled him on the art of dress. And we also see the battles against racism and homophobia he has faced during his 40 years in the fashion industry.
Source: Tribeca Film Festival
The Man Who Stole Banksy
In 2007, a bodybuilder and taxi driver named Walid the Beast cut out an entire cement wall in Palestine that contained art by the elusive street artist Banksy and tried to sell it to the highest bidder. The Man Who Stole Banksy takes us into an underground market of stolen walls and examines the commodification of street art and the politics that surround stealing, collecting, and selling art.
Source: Tribeca Film Festival
The Miseducation of Cameron Post
When teenage Cameron (Chloë Grace Moretz) is caught having sex with another girl on prom night, she is shipped off to a treatment center where she is subjected to controversial gay conversion therapies. She befriends two other teens Jane (Sasha Lane, American Honey) and Adam (Forrest Goodluck, The Revenant) at the center who also pretend to be “cured” since that is the only way to escape is to pretend something was wrong with them that needed to be fixed. The Miseducation of Cameron Post won the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and is based on a novel by the same name.
Source: Tribeca Film Festival
Time for Ilhan
Ilhan Omar is a Muslim woman from Somalia who ran for office as Minnesota state representative in 2016, running against a 43-year incumbent. As of the latest count, 431 women have all decided to run for public office in 2018, more than double the amount of women who ran in 2016, the same year that Omar ran. She is a trailblazer and a documentary about her campaign sounds like the perfect thing to watch for those with an interest in politics and policy — or maybe have political aspirations themselves.
Source: Tribeca Film Festival
Zoe
In the not-so-distant future, a computerized test can determine the likelihood of successful partnership between two individuals, and androids have been designed as the ideal partners. Two scientists who work in the lab who makes the androids flirt with the possibility of a relationship, until an accident forces them to reconsider everything they thought they knew. This sounds like an intriguing conceit for a romantic drama—or a uniquely terrifying Black Mirror episode. It stars Léa Seydoux and one of my personal favorite actors, Ewan McGregor.
The 2018 Tribeca Film Festival begins April 18 and lasts throughout New York City until April 29.
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Danielle A. Scruggs is a Chicago-based photographer and writer who runs the website Black Women Directors and is also the Director of Photography at the Chicago Reader, an award-winning alt-weekly newspaper. Follow her on Twitter at @dascruggs and view her site at daniellescruggs.com.
