TRIBECA, 12 Days, 132 Films, 38 Countries

Jojo Whilden

Lawrence Wright in “My Trip to Al-Qaeda.”

Don’t imagine that because its subject is 9/11, Alex Gibney’s documentary “My Trip to Al-Qaeda,” is merely the latest in a long list of depressing films about the aftermath of that catastrophe. “My Trip to Al-Qaeda,” which exemplifies the loftiest ambitions of the Tribeca Film Festival, beginning its ninth year on Wednesday, is an utterly compelling (dare I say entertaining?) personal history lesson, filled with insights that come as little jolts.

Film: River Surfing, Rugby Bonding and Bicycle Soaring(April 16, 2010)

Details on the Tribeca Film Festival (April 16, 2010)

Adapted from Lawrence Wright’s 2007 one-man play and based on his book “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11,” the film offers what may be the definitive cinematic investigation of the cultural and historical roots on 9/11.

Because the festival, which runs through May 2, was born in the ashes of the World Trade Center as a community development project to revive the devastated economy of Lower Manhattan, you might say “My Trip to Al-Qaeda” is woven into Tribeca’s DNA.

It is one of 85 features (about the same as last year) being shown in a festival whose programming runs from Hollywood razzle-dazzle to the most adventurous, marginally commercial world cinema. The big-time fireworks begin with the opening-night screening of “Shrek Forever After,” the fourth and final edition of that blockbuster franchise, shown in 3-D. For the closing-night film, “Freakonomics”(adapted from the best seller by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, who contribute to a blog at nytimes.com), to be released this year, Mr. Gibney is one of six contributing directors. His film, still untitled, about Eliot Spitzer is also being shown in Tribeca as a work in progress.

If this is the year of Alex Gibney, whose documentary about torture, “Taxi to the Dark Side,” won an Academy Award (and had its premiere at Tribeca in 2007), he is but one of many reputable filmmakers to be showing new work at the festival. “Micmacs,” a surreal exercise in high slapstick from Jean-Pierre Jeunet (“Amélie,” “Delicatessen”), follows a ragtag bunch of junkyard dealers as they engage in a comic David-and-Goliath battle with a weapons manufacturer. This whiz-bang comedy is a live-action “Toy Story” for grown-ups that channels the spirit of Buster Keaton. Filled with elaborate sight gags and contraptions worthy of Rube Goldberg, the film further establishes Mr. Jeunet as a genre unto himself, a sort of Gallic Tim Burton. Fatih Akin’s frantic comedy “Soul Kitchen” is an engaging out-and-out farce about restaurants and real estate in Hamburg, made by the German-Turkish Mr. Akin, who achieved international recognition with the more dramatic “Head On” and “The Edge of Heaven.” Other artistic name brands include Neil Jordan (“Ondine”), Michael Winterbottom (“The Killer Inside Me”) and Nicole Holofcener (“Please Give”). All told, 38 countries are represented, including Britain (seven films), France (six), Ireland (four) and South Korea (three).

Overall the quality of films this year is the same as last: hit or miss. There is much that is interesting, little that is great. The Cannes Film Festival still draws the cream of world cinema; the Sundance and Toronto festivals attract the best American independent films.

Two incisive documentary portraits — “Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work,” directed by Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg, and Craig Teper’s “Vidal Sassoon The Movie” — upset conventional notions about the businesses of comedy and hairdressing. In “A Piece of Work” Ms. Rivers celebrates her 75th birthday and talks bluntly about aging, the rigors of her brutal profession and her compulsive drive to stay at the top of the comedy game and bankroll her extravagant lifestyle.

The Sassoon film makes a credible case for the artistic importance of hairdressing, which Mr. Sassoon reinvented as a form of architectural design. Both the Rivers and Sassoon films illustrate that their subjects’ sustained success is no accident: both are driven by a relentless, controlling perfectionism and workaholic personalities.

But among the two dozen Tribeca films I’ve sampled, none is as revelatory as “My Trip to Al-Qaeda,” a cinematically illustrated Spalding Gray-style monologue by Mr. Wright, which begins with his description of his personal connection to 9/11.

He was a screenwriter for the 1998 movie “The Siege,” which imagined a wave of terrorist bombings in New York after the secret abduction by the United States military of a suspected Islamic terrorist. As Mr. Wright points out, the spectacle of 9/11 made the attacks a horrifying real-life Hollywood blockbuster, and in the month after 9/11, he adds ruefully, “ ‘The Siege’ was the most rented movie in America, making me the first profiteer in the war on terror.”

If there is a trend in this year’s festival, it is that so many of its films blur the lines between fiction and documentary, some literally, others stylistically. The high resolution of movies shot on digital video is a major factor in the dissolving of forms into one another, as the changing and rapidly proliferating technology nudges filmmakers and actors alike toward a clinical ultrarealism.

As big-ticket Hollywood movies increasingly embrace a cartoon aesthetic and draw back from dramatic realism with frankly phony computer-generated effects, smaller independent films are moving in to fill the gap. The more ambitious ones increasingly evoke elevated offshoots of reality television, which paradoxically is itself a form of fiction.

This confusion is evident in Tribeca’s two major competitions for best world narrative film and best world documentary. In some cases, if you didn’t know in advance, you couldn’t tell which was which.

Following are capsule descriptions of some of the more intriguing films in both contests.

World Narrative Film

DOG POUND

Directed by Kim Chapiron, the film examines the institutionalized brutality at a youth correctional center in Montana through the experiences of three teenage inmates. The film, cast with actual boys in detention, shows why it is almost impossible to avoid brutalization in an insular, punitive culture with a vicious pecking order that fosters rage. The horrors culminate with a rape, an accidental killing of an inmate by a guard and a full-scale riot.

PAJU

The rewarding but complicated South Korean film directed by Park Chan-ok, jumps back and forth in time over eight years as it follows a guilt-ridden young man on the lam. Hiding out in the bleak title city near the North Korean border, he becomes involved in radical protests against forced gentrification and has complicated relationships with two sisters, one of whom disappears.

SNAP

This Irish film directed by Carmel Winters, has a ferocious performance by Aisling O’Sullivan as the mother of a 15-year-old son who abducts a toddler and holds him captive. The movie unfolds as a mystery that begins with the mother, who has become a social pariah, telling her story to a documentary film crew.

Film: River Surfing, Rugby Bonding and Bicycle Soaring(April 16, 2010)

Details on the Tribeca Film Festival (April 16, 2010)

WHEN WE LEAVE

Written and directed Feo Aladag, the German film tells the harrowing story of an abused Turkish wife (Sibel Kekilli), who flees Istanbul with her 5-year-old son to stay with her family in Berlin. But in her father’s house the same patriarchal rules apply. When she refuses to return to Turkey, her family rejects her, and she is forced to find refuge in a safe house. There is worse to come.

THE WHITE MEADOWS

Filmed on the salt formations of Lake Urmia in Iran, the mystical, allegorical movie filmed in shades of white, follows an itinerant mariner who rows from island to island as he listens to people’s secret sorrows and collects their tears in glass jars. Their woes metaphorically (but obliquely) parallel oppressive conditions in Iran. Written and directed by Mohammad Rasoulof, “The White Meadows” is the competition’s most poetic film.

WILLIAM VINCENT

Set in New York, the film tracks an solitary pickpocket (James Franco) who takes a job as courier for a drug dealer (Josh Lucas) and has an enigmatic flirtation with his girlfriend (Julianne Nicholson). Written and directed by Jay Anania, this nearly plotless poetic noir compares its characters to glowingly photographed exotic creatures in the natural world.

World Documentary

THE ARBOR

Clio Barnard examines the unhappy life of the British playwright Andrea Dunbar, who died at 29 in 1990, and her relationship with her troubled daughter Lorraine. “The Arbor” is the nickname for the blighted housing complex in northern England where Ms. Dunbar grew up and where her plays were set. Audio interviews with Dunbar’s family and neighbors are re-enacted by an array of excellent character actors.

SONS OF PERDITION

The sad documentary by Tyler Measom and Jennilyn Merten is a nightmarish real-life answer to the HBO series “Big Love.” Looking at the struggle to fit into society by teenagers who fled a fundamentalist Mormon sect, the FLDS Church in Colorado City, Ariz., led by the notorious Warren S. Jeffs, a polygamous self-appointed prophet now in prison for rape, the film shows young men trying to recover from their indoctrination into an insular subculture of forced marriages, mind control and ritual humiliation.

THE WOODMANS

The parents and friends of Francesca Woodman, the posthumously famous photographer who committed suicide in 1981 when she was 22, remember her in C. Scott Willis’s documentary. Because the parents, Betty and George Woodman, are also nationally known artists, the film touches on unhealed family wounds: most important, professional jealousy.

The above films are just a sampling of selections taken from an international film culture that is increasingly congested with serious, worthwhile movies shot on digital video. The more they are produced, the more crucial the role of adventurous festivals like Tribeca to serve as a clearinghouse for work that deserves an audience. The density of traffic on the digital highway is only likely to increase.

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