With over 200 movies being screened during the Tribeca Film Festival, it can be overwhelming to decide which to see. This list of recommended films from the 2005 Tribeca Film Festival should make the task of choosing a movie easier. (All screenings are $10 unless otherwise noted.)
This energetic and uplifting documentary follows young NYC students as they enliven their urban existence with the unlikeliest of hobbies: ballroom dancing. As students practice their steps and prepare for competition, they learn valuable lessons about what it takes to succeed at the tougher-than-you-think task in front of them, as well as what it takes to succeed in life. Award-winning photographer and music video director LaChapelle captures the heart-pounding world of krumping, a team dance sport that originated in South Central Los Angeles and offers kids not only a way to physically express themselves, but an alternative community to gangs and drugs. 3. "Neo Ned" (Narrative Feature Competition)
They say opposites attract. What about an Aryan Brother who falls for a black woman who thinks she's Adolf Hitler after their meeting in a mental institution? This seemingly impossible connection is the start of a love story unlike none other. Jeremy Renner and Gabrielle Union star in one of the most original romances of recent times.4. "Transamerica" (Narrative Feature Competition)
In this emotional comedy, a pre-operative transsexual woman (Felicity Huffman of "Desperate Housewives") and an adolescent male hustler take a road trip from New York City to Los Angeles after the woman bails him out of jail. The two embark on an unexpected journey, but she fails to divulge her secret…that she is his biological father.5. "Punk: Attitude" (Documentary Feature Competition)
Time: the mid 1970s. Place: the transatlantic twin cities of New York and London. A revolution in pop music, film, and fashion shatters the establishment's status quo and impacts all future youth generations. Punk: Attitude chronicles how teenage rebellion and social change birthed the defiant punk movement.6. "A State of Mind" (Documentary Feature Competition)
This documentary follows two young gymnasts with unprecedented access, as they prepare for the Mass Games, one of North Korea's most important and elaborate events. Along with striking footage of the Games themselves, this eye-opening film also shows the daily lives of people in one of the world's most closed societies.7. "Satellite" (NY, NY Narrative Features)
This romantic fable has all the eccentric charm of Amelie, though with a harder New York edge. It even has its own presiding Audrey Tautou-like gamine in Stephanie Szostak, a winsome French model-actress who plays Ro, who falls in love with the stranger she follows on a midtown street.8. "Conventioneers" (NY, NY Narrative Features)
The United States' current division into red states and blue states is given a romantic twist in the ironic Romeo & Juliettesque The Conventioneers. Set against the 2004 Republican National Convention, it explores the complicated, bitter relationship of a Republican delegate in love with a Democrat protesting the RNC.9. "The F Word" (NY, NY Narrative Features)
In Medium Cool, Haskell Wexler mixed fiction with documentary footage when he had actors emote on location in Chicago while real violence swirled around them at the '68 Democratic convention. This time, director Weintrob put his actors on Manhattan streets while the demonstrators and police surrounded them at last summer's Republican convention.10. "Excavating Taylor Mead" (NY, NY Documentary Features)
Taylor Mead, film icon and former Andy Warhol superstar who lives in a monumentally cluttered apartment, is now a septuagenarian whose career ranges from playing Tarzan in one of Warhol's movies to the role of Man at Party in Midnight Cowboy to Taylor in Jim Jarmusch's recent Coffee and Cigarettes.
