Tribeca: Fin.

The complete list of festival winner is here. Selections:Best Narrative Feature: "Blessed By Fire," Dir: Tristán Bauer (Spain) Best Doc: "The War Tapes," Dir: Deborah Scranton (USA) Best NY Narrative Feature: "The Treatment," Dir: Oren Rudavsky Best NY Doc Feature: "When I Came Home," Dir: Dan Lohaus Jury Prize: "Voices of Bam," Dirs: Aliona van der Horst and Maasja Ooms (The Netherlands) Audience Award: "The Cats of Mirikitani," Dir: Linda Hattendorf The general grumblings about the festival seem to be that it's looking a little porky around the midsection, and that sure as hell isn't muscle under there in the narrative programs. indieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez kicks off an article on "Toots" and "Rock the Bells," two docs he liked, with:There has been considerable griping among buyers again at this year's Tribeca Film Festival, with industry-types maintaining that there simply are not enough quality films to warrant the size of...

The complete list of festival winner is here. Selections:

Best Narrative Feature: "Blessed By Fire," Dir: Tristán Bauer (Spain)

Best Doc: "The War Tapes," Dir: Deborah Scranton (USA)

Best NY Narrative Feature: "The Treatment," Dir: Oren Rudavsky

Best NY Doc Feature: "When I Came Home," Dir: Dan Lohaus

Jury Prize: "Voices of Bam," Dirs: Aliona van der Horst and Maasja Ooms (The Netherlands)

Audience Award: "The Cats of Mirikitani," Dir: Linda Hattendorf

The general grumblings about the festival seem to be that it’s looking a little porky around the midsection, and that sure as hell isn’t muscle under there in the narrative programs. indieWIRE‘s Eugene Hernandez kicks off an article on "Toots" and "Rock the Bells," two docs he liked, with:

There has been considerable griping among buyers again at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, with industry-types maintaining that there simply are not enough quality films to warrant the size of the festival’s program. In the case of the event’s doc programming, though, insiders and audiences alike seemed to connect with a number of films this year.

At his blog, he writes that:

Having spoken with a number of film biz insiders and journalists, its clear to me that the festival has to really grapple with the fact that much of the industry seems to look upon their event with a major sense of dread. This year’s biggest complaints remain the size of program, and now insiders are unhappy with the fact that the event takes place all over town. I completely agree with the former concern and disagree entirely with the latter.

At Like Anna Karina’s Sweater, Filmbrain wonders "[D]oes NYC truly need a festival of this size?", and points out that:

During the two weeks of the TFF, there was also the opportunity to see a dozen Naruse films, Melville’s "Army of Shadows," an impressive African Film Festival, an Altman retrospective, and not to mention the releases of "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu," "Three Times," and "Sympathy for Lady Vengeance." Were two hundred additional films really necessary?

At half the size, the festival would still be large enough to be classified a "big" event, and would have forced the selection committee to pare down the selections — some of which, quite frankly, didn’t belong in an international film festival.

We surrendered to allergies and illness this weekend and gave up on trying to catch a few final films. Spirit: broken. We have to agree with the oversized argument — we understand that program size is an easy way to establish dominance, particularly since the festival is so young: Tribeca! It’s huge! But we saw plenty of things that weren’t worth seeing, and with the size of the program it’s hard to word of mouth to spread about a title that is worthy. We can live with the expansion into midtown. We can live with the incongruous, glossy big-budget premieres. But it does the smaller films a disservice to be tucked away in a massive selection of mid-level films mostly distinguished by having one or two recognizable names attached.

If you’d like to glance over coverage, we suggest Aaron Hillis at Premiere, Andrew O’Hehir at Salon, who in a fit of weariness launches into a very funny rant about how the "mockumentary must be stopped," while also suggesting that the problems plaguing American indie narrative cinema stem from the fact that "[m]ost younger filmmakers these days have no background in the old-fashioned narrative traditions, like literature or drama, let alone in the Freudian and/or Marxist theories of personality and society that underpinned them for most of the 20th century." And there’s also Bilge Ebiri and Logan Hill at New York, who’ve fearlessly plowed through an impressive selection of films (Hill writes of "Fat Girls": "A lot of the Tribeca selections feel as if they’ve been filmed by 20-year-olds, but this promising debut actually was." Heh.).

We did manage to see one last film which we liked quite a bit: Jan Svankmajer‘s "Lunacy," which purports to be a horror film (inspired by two Poe stories and the Marquis de Sade), but is really just another example of Svankmajer’s deadpan (and often very funny) surrealism. Jean, a gaunt, naive young man (Pavel Liska), is on his way back from his mother’s funeral when he’s waylaid by the Marquis (Jan Triska), who offers him a ride and is soon making him the butt of a series of cruel jokes. Eventually, the Marquis convinces Jean to overcome his fears of madness (his mother went insane) by voluntarily checking himself into a chaotic asylum run by one of the Marquis’ friends.

Scenes are punctuated by interludes in which Svankmajer puts his distinctive stop-motion technique to use on meat products. Pieces of steak inch across the floor; cow tongues crawl across the table and attempt to lap up beer. At once whimsical and disturbing, they’re the unforgettable takeaway image from the film, though as lingering is the underlying sense of urgency. In the asylum-as-political-allegory, things are either run by a terrifyingly strict Dr. Coulmiere or the ridiculously lax Dr. Murlloppe, but it’s clear that both are as insane as any of their patients.

+ 2006 Award Winners (TribecaFilmFestival.com)
+ TRIBECA ’06: The Doc Is In: "Toots" and "Rock The Bells" (indieWIRE)
+ tff (eugonline)
+ Tribeca Report 2 – The Misses (Like Anna Karina’s Sweater)
+ Tribeca Updates (Premiere)
+ Tribeca roundup: Further hints of apocalypse, one American indie worth seeing (at last) and Just Say No to the mockumentary (Salon)
+ Tribeca Scorecard (New York)