NEW YORK — The Tribeca Film Festival (TFF) has announced projects in the new Storyscapes section and Special Screenings for the 12th edition of the Festival, taking place April 17 to April 28 in New York City.
New to TFF this year, and joining a range of programs at the Festival that bridge filmmaking and technology, is Storyscapes created in collaboration with Bombay Sapphire Gin. This multi-platform transmedia program celebrates new trends in digital media and recognizes filmmakers and content creators who employ an interactive, web-based or cross-platform approach to story creation.
Curated by the TFF Programming team along with Ingrid Kopp, Director of Digital Initiatives for the Tribeca Film Institute, the Storyscapes program will present five selections at a public, interactive installation at the Bombay Sapphire House of Imagination (121 Varick Street, 7th Floor) starting from April 19 – April 21, 2013.
“The possibilities for telling stories are evolving and our aim is to create an immersive space where this participatory, transmedia work can be experienced,” said Ingrid Kopp, Director of Digital Initiatives for the Tribeca Film Institute. “I am honored to have been a part of this Festival-first and cannot think of a better location than New York City for such a vibrant conversation around this emerging art form. We look forward to building a community in this space where storytelling and technology, authorship and openness meet.”
The complete list of films selected for Special Screenings and projects in Storyscapes follows:
STORYSCAPES
Tribeca Film Festival’s Storyscapes has been created in collaboration with BOMBAY SAPPHIRE® Gin and is a new juried section at the Festival to showcase innovative, interactive, transmedia work across genres. The possibilities for telling stories are changing as creators experiment with new technologies and new forms of audience participation. This participation is reflected in the human/A.I. interactions of the Robots in Residence and the joyfully fan created scenes in Star Wars Uncut. This Exquisite Forest allows the audience to create their own animations, A Journal of Insomnia enables all of us to share our stories of sleepless nights. Finally, Sandy Storyline is a kaleidoscope of people’s experiences during and after the storm, a project that is ongoing. We want to showcase this exciting new landscape, creating an immersive space where this work can be experienced and appreciated as interactive installations.
- A Journal of Insomnia, Project creators: Bruno Choiniere, Philippe Lambert, and Guillaume Braun. (Canada). Insomniacs are both spectators and actors in this large, interactive fresco that combines hundreds of personal reflections on sleepless nights, gathered online from insomniacs around the world since fall 2012. This work, produced by The National Film Board of Canada, provides a cutting portrait of insomnia as a universal and peculiarly wide-ranging affliction and challenges visitors to experience the condition for themselves.
- Robots in Residence, Project Creators: Brent Hoff and Alexander Reben. (USA). Robots in Residence challenges Alfred Hitchcock’s claim that “in feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director.” Here there is no god, as pre-programmed robots collaborate with festival audiences to direct and shoot a documentary in its entirety. Robot artist Alexander Reben and filmmaker Brent Hoff forge a provocative new form of documentary storytelling by using robots as a lens through which we take a new look at humanity.
- Sandy Storyline, Project Creators: Rachel Falcone, Laura Gottesdiener, and Michael Premo. (USA). Using audio, photography, text and video, Sandy Storyline is an ever-growing documentary narrative as community members and volunteers offer their accounts of the storm and the efforts to recover and rebuild local neighborhoods. The project forges a new type of media in time of crisis, one that is participatory, interactive and designed for community empowerment.
- Star Wars Uncut, Project Creator: Casey Pugh. (USA). Love Star Wars but think you would have done it differently? Then this fun, creative and wonderfully nostalgic interactive media project is for you. Using everything from hand-drawn animations to intricate reenactments, fans and series novices created short alternatives to the Star Wars storyline and went online to piece them all together. Discover a whole new approach to Star Wars, one fifteen-second burst at a time.
- This Exquisite Forest, Project Creators: Aaron Koblin and Chris Milk (USA). Conceived by Chris Milk and Aaron Koblin and produced by Google and Tate Modern, This Exquisite Forest was inspired by the surrealist game “exquisite corpse” and its idea of collaborative creation. The project, hosted at exquisiteforest.com, allows visitors to create short animations right in their web browser. Other users may build on the animation at any point, creating a collection of navigable, branching narratives resembling trees that grow bigger as more artists contribute.
SPECIAL SCREENINGS
- Alberi, directed by Michaelangelo Frammartino. (Italy) –World Premiere, Documentary. Wrapping the audience in waves of sound, Alberi takes us on a circular journey through the Italian countryside. The marvelous natural music at the tops of the eponymous trees makes way for the rhythmic cadence of civilization—men baring axes and the natural clatter of daily life—before their unforgettable return home from the forest. The singular artistry of director Michelangelo Frammartino (Le quatro volte) is beautifully displayed in this mesmerizing homage to nature. Italian with subtitles.
Alberi will run as an installation in the VW Dome at MoMA PS1 from April 18th through the end of the month, with a special event celebrating the world premiere on the evening of Saturday, April 20th.
- Sidewalk Stories, directed and written by Charles Lane. (USA) –Narrative. The low-budget, New York-in-the-’80s movie that proves that silence is not all that golden, Charles Lane’s magnetic Sidewalk Stories is long overdue for rediscovery. Lane plays a sidewalk chalk artist whose efforts to care for an abandoned toddler are confounded by the oddball homeless characters he meets. Black-and-white and mostly silent, the film is an ingenious and whimsical effort by a black artist to give a voice to those who have none.
- Herblock – The Black & The White, directed by Michael Stevens, written by Sara Lukinson and Stevens. (USA) – World Premiere, Documentary. Herbert Block’s career at The Washington Post spanned fifty-five years and thirteen presidents, a timeframe in which he claimed three Pulitzer Prizes, the Medal of Freedom and a significant role in President Nixon’s resignation. Ben Bradlee, Tom Brokaw, Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, Jules Feiffer, Ted Koppel and Jon Stewart are among the many commentators bearing witness to Block’s life, work and indelible contribution to American satire in this inviting documentary. Herbert Block to attend.
- The Trials of Muhammad Ali, directed by Bill Siegel. (USA) – World Premiere, Documentary. Brash boxer Cassius Clay burst into the American consciousness in the early 1960s, just ahead of the Civil Rights movement. His transformation into the spiritually enlightened heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali is legendary, but this religious awakening also led to a bitter legal battle with the U.S. government after he refused to serve in the Vietnam War. This film reveals the perfect storm of race, religion and politics that shaped one of the most recognizable figures in sports history.
- Running From Crazy, directed by Barbara Kopple. (USA) – New York Premiere, Documentary. Join actress Mariel Hemingway, granddaughter of legendary author Ernest Hemingway, as she examines the mental illness and suicide that colors her family’s history and tries to avert that fate for herself and her daughters. By mixing in remarkable archival footage of the three Hemingway sisters, two-time Academy Award®-winner Barbara Kopple expands one famous family’s deeply embedded truths into a broad picture of the courage it takes to face the past and change your future.
- Möbius, directed and written by Eric Rochant. (France) – International Premiere, Narrative. Set in the incomparable beauty of Monaco, Eric Rochant’s first feature in seven years follows undercover Russian FSB officer Gregory Lioubov (Jean Dujardin, The Artist) and international trader Alice Redmond (Cécile De France, Hereafter), who has her own secrets to hide. Their relationship sparks a deadly chase to snag Lioubov’s real target, business magnate Ivan Rostovsky (Tim Roth). Also starring Émilie Dequenne, Möbius is a twisting, sexy spy thriller that fittingly leaves you guessing which way is up. Featuring special guest appearances from director Eric Rochant and main actress Cécile de France.
The TFF takes place April 17 to April 28 in New York City. For more information, visit the Tribeca Film Festival website at www.tribecafilm.com