The Tribeca Film Festival short films went to the serious side this year, reflecting an artistic disenchantment with the times.
President Ronald Regan’s 1980 War on Drugs affected Black American communities for a generation. With Gestapo tactics men were rounded up, then railroaded into the incarceration system. Most charges stemmed from Marijuana possession. As states legalize dispensaries People of Color find themselves locked of a fast-growing industry valued at $45 billion.
Kiss My Grass, the short film from directing duo Mary Pryor and Martha Whitehead tells the struggles of Black Women trying to gain a small foothold in the cannabis business. As the polite smile s from investor reply “no” time and time again, the lady’s frustration of hitting brick walls cannot be overstated. Black Entrepreneurs know fundraising is a high mountain to climb. In seventeen minutes, the short film encapsulated the structural racial reality in America. People of Color are jail fodder, however when the moment comes to gain economic benefit, The Sharecropper Rules apply. America does not have enthusiasm for Black Success.
Mary and Martha bring stats and emotion to the film with spots of outrage, sadness and the hard reality of not being in the right club.
The 80’s
Money Talks frames multiple stories around encounters with a $100 bill used in New York City at the beginning of Ronald Regan’s America. Tony Mucci takes a cynical view with characters living on the edge. The stylized short film keeps the forward moving pattern going with each sequence realistically transitioning to another in 34 minutes.

A pleasant short documentary on a tune that became a sort of scamp theme song of the 80’s hit the mark. Oh Yeah from Nick Canfield will please the Gen X crowd. The tune was made famous in the 1986 movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and in The Simpsons for Duff Man. Writers Dieter Meier and Boris Blank talk about the process and luck behind 1985 electronic music single.
Freeman Vines the dark open secret of lynching. Diving into a painful topic, Tim Kirkman and Andre Robert Lee somberly record the story of guitar maker Freeman Vines from Fountain North Carolina. What makes his instruments special, the wood comes from a true used to murder a Black Man.
Two works inspired by Exploitation Films of the 1970’s, The Wrath of Othell-Yo and ATTAGAIRL.

Wrath is a tale of an actor who gets his chance to play a “big role” in a film production after the lead actor has issues of manhood.
Short mayhem, ATTAGIRL is a fierce short on why you should not get on the bad side of a Bookie from Hell, run for New Jersey!
All films were screened online from the Tribeca Film Festival platform.