Announcing the award for Best New Narrative Filmmaker at the Tribeca Film Festival's awards party, Uma Thurman had to use her stage voice when the microphone suddenly cut out. Later, Robert De Niro lost the envelope with the final winner of the night and wound up reading it off a press release.In short, the ceremony was not perfect, but it wound up as something better than that: Human.
The evening gathering in Union Square brought together a melting pot of New York celebrities and filmmakers from around the world. The jurors ranged from Mary-Kate Olsen and Meg Ryan to New York Magazine food critic Gael Greene, but despite the somewhat random assortment, their decisions yielded welcome results. Almost all of the winners were small movies that could use the extra boost -- and, perhaps more importantly, they were all pretty good.
After the bittersweet immigration drama "Entre Nos" won a Special Jury Prize, co-director Paola Mendoza came close to tears as she noted that the story was based on her mother's struggle during her early years in the United States. "It's a small little film and we put our hears and souls into it," Mendoza said. The movie backs up her statement with a heartfelt performance by the director herself.
It was a similar case for documentarian Danae Elon, who also appears in the movie she directed, although she's not putting on a performance. Her documentary, "Partly Private," offers a cute, amusing survey of contemporary views on circumcision, using the birth of her two boys as a unique case study.
Winning the award for Best New York Documentary, Elon said she "would have put makeup on if I knew this would happen." But since her movie is about a deeply personal physical procedure, her natural appearance fit the occasion.
The other documentaries honored at the ceremony also deserved the accolades. Yoav Shamir's "Defamation," which I found fascinating and somewhat revelatory, landed a Special Jury Mention. "Racing Dreams, " Mashall Curry's insightful portrait of the World Karting Association, won Best Documentary Feature, while the harrowing Afghanistan-based "Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi" took home the Best New Documentary Filmmaker prize.
"Fixer" director Ian Olds, whose movie tracks the kidnapping and ultimate execution of the eponymous foreign journalist aid, told me he's glad to have a television deal in place for the movie (it airs on HBO in late August), and seemed somewhat nonchalant about whether or not a theatrical distributor steps up to the plate.
But that was before he won the award.
In general, it seemed that the honorees were boosted in their confidence and ready to take De Niro up on his offer to return with new works. After announcing the Best Narrative Feature Award for Asghar Farhad's "About Elly," the actor-turned-festival founder graciously posed for photographs with hordes of eager filmmakers.
"He's been doing this for twenty minutes," moaned a festival publicist.
