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Short Film Disenchantments  

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. 

Tribeca Film Festival Short Festival
OH YEAH! Dieter Meier and Boris Blank

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.

Tribeca Film Festival Shorts

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.

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Cinema entertainment news

Stories from the Plantation Life

On My 15th 2025 the largest plantation of them all burned to the ground because of an electrical fire.  The Nottoway Plantation with 53,000 square feet over three floors, 64 rooms was the grandest of them all.  Sitting in White Castle Louisiana, with giant columns, wrap around porches and grand sitting rooms built in 1859 showcased the wealth brought by slavery for owner John Randolf.  What was once a place of violent servitude evolved into a place of celebrations for weddings and selected touristic history.  African Americans celebrated the pyric finality of the antebellum mansion built on the backs of ancestors in chains under a whip.  The Black Social Media memes trended for days. 

Up the river on the opposite stateside shore sits the oldest city on the Mississippi, Natchez, founded in 1716 in the heart of the Deep Cotton Belt.  Grand houses lined leafy streets.  

From the riches of human bondage, Natchez once had the highest concentration of wealth in the United States.

Suzannah Herbert’s absorbing, at times gut punching, documentary Natchez is a story of who tells the tale.  Through 86 minutes the Memphis based director lets the camera roll on her subjects without interference or judgement.   What comes through in the film is a wide divergence of opinions, institutional denial, classism, race and contradictions. 

The first scene shows the real power in Natchez, The Women Garden Club’s gathering with the mayor.   The city’s main source of income is Heritage Tourism and tours. Tourists come to see and learn how the Pre-Civil War Southern Aristocrats lived. Hosts regale visitors with genteel ancestral tales of sitting in magnificently decorated parlors while eating tea cakes, sipping tea in flowy hoop skirts served by the “workers”.  The word “workers” is in the official script approved by the Garden Club. 

Rewritten

On the other side of the tracks, the guided tours tilt to the rawer but spellbinding side. Reverend Collins perhaps has fewer tours, because he tells the horrible tale of rape and daily degradation in the life of a slave and the aftermath of the institution to the disbelief of his clients.   For Collins, exposing the conscience cover up of the 400-year crime is the most important lesson for visitors.  The history of slavery has been rewritten depending on who you ask.

Rev Collins giving a tour in the film Natchez.

 The protagonists in Natchez view each other with mistrust.  Each representing a narrative.  As the tourist numbers and income fall, younger travellers are no longer interested in the “Gone with The Wind” romantic version of slavery Natchez finds itself at a crossroads. Either give a real accounting of how the city’s wealth built on cruelty or for stay with the same narrative yielding diminishing returns. 

Herbert’s slow build story telling ability works well. The contrasting views ranging from pride, dismissive, incendiary to wilful ignorance are handled without a judging eye even if audiences could have difficulty identifying with the figures on the screen concocting a fantasy lifestyle of 19th century Southern Culture.  This could have easily descended into comical vignettes, the filmmaker never loses her grip on the story.  The focus stays on the different interpretations of the American Story. 

Natchez does not pile on racial guilt or morality.  That is the charm, instead the film allows the audience to figure out the truth.

Screened online at the Tribeca Film Festival

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Fashion

On The Tribeca Radar

Tribeca Film Festival started on the 4th. The New York fest has some interesting works unspooling this year.

Tribeca Film Festival
Natchez

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Cinema entertainment entertainment news

Greek Cinema Arrives in Berlin

For its tenth anniversary, the Greek Film Festival in Berlin offers another five days of screenings. The innovative program has benefitted both German and international audiences alike. Once again the screenings take place at Berlin’s legendary Babylon Mitte Cinema. Originating in 2016 the festival was initially known as Hellas Filmbox Berlin. Festival director Sofia Stavrianidou and her team rebranded to its current name in 2020. Since 2022 the festival has also travelled to Frankfurt and from 2023 in Cologne too.

This year the Opening Film is Stelios, directed by Yorgos Tsemberopoulos. It showcases the life of legendary singer Stelios Kazantzidis. Coming from a Pontic refugee family, his immense talent helped him overcome social and personal challenges. With his “Laiko” (a Greek folk-pop music genre) songs he won the hearts of a nation. For an opening film on the festival’s tenth edition, Stelios has an appropriately Greek celebratory factor.

Another intriguing main competition section features this year. Six films are competing for the best prize award in the section called Emerging Greeks Competition. All films are Berlin, German or International Premieres. Brando with a Glass Eye is directed by Antonis Tsonis. Set in the Greek capital, Athens, it concerns a heist that goes wrong and subsequent redemption. Killerwood by Christos Massalas blends fiction with perceived notions of reality. The premise of a young director’s film is a list of unsolved murders in Athens. However, could they be the work of a real-life serial killer?

Aside from Athens, images of Greece that come to mind are the countless Islands. In Kyuka: Before Summer’s End by Kostis Charamountanis, the island of Poros is the setting. It is summer and a single father and his adolescent twin children sail to the island. By chance they will meet their mother, who abandoned them when they were babies. More remote exotic islands are the setting for Maldives by Daniel Bolda. This time the family is a man and his dog in the secluded mountains. However the man’s world turns upside down when the dog disappears.

Back to Greece and domesticity again is Riviera by Orfeas Peretzis. When her mother announces they will leave, Alkistis contemplates one final summer living on the Athenian Riviera. Finally, Meat, by Dimitris Nakos is set in a village in the Greek countryside. After opening his butcher shop, Takis is confronted with truth and loyalty. When his son kills a neighbor who claimed part of their land there is one witness. Trouble is that he is also a long-term employee of Takis.

The 2025 Competition Jury is: Simone Baumann (Germany), Nikos Smpiliris (Greece) and Dr. Martin Blaney (UK). They are also the Documentary Jury.  

~ By Steven Yates   

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Cinema entertainment news

McKellen’s Critic

The Critic: Strong performance from McKellen  

Finally released in German cinemas, The Critic stars renowned stage and screen actor Sir Ian McKellen. It is London, 1934, and McKellen is an infamous theatre critic called Jimmy Erskine. For fifty years Erskine has written biting theatrical reviews for respected national newspaper The Daily Chronicle. When the newspaper proprietor dies, his son David Brooke (Mark Strong) takes charge. However, Brooke wants to implement immediate changes to compete with its rival The Daily Mail. He also advises Erskine to tone down his writing style, and public proclivities.

Ian McKellen  in The Critic

Meanwhile, struggling theatre actress Nina Land (Gemma Arterton) also admires Erskine’s work. Therefore, she is upset by his cruel reviews of her performances, and this also infuriates Brooke. When Erskine is arrested for drunken and lewd behavior, the editor issues him a final warning. This will soon culminate in Brooke ending Erskine’s contract with one month’s notice.  

Needing to save his job, Erskine watches Nina’s performance in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Brooke is also in the audience and Erskine notices him emotionally moved.  Therefore he writes Nina the glowing review she has always wished for. However, this praise for Nina will come at a cost. In return, she must do him a favor and seduce the already besotted Chronicle editor.

The Critic is McKellen’s film, he almost singlehandedly saves it from oblivion. Although Arterton and Strong give excellent supporting performances, no other characters are foregrounded or resonate. Patrick Marber’s previous scripts for Closer (2004) and Notes on a Scandal (2006) had tangible sensitivity. However, in The Critic witticisms take precedent over progressive characterization.

Anand Tucker is multi-talented and experienced in all aspects of film production. Here, however, the effect is counter-productive. There is no conspicuous director imprint and so the trajectory becomes jarring. Indeed, The Critic premiered at Toronto IFF in September 2023 to mixed reviews. It was considered that the dark ending was unpopular with the audience. Therefore, the film’s distributor requested re-shoots. The September 2024 general release had a new cut and a new ending. 

By Steven Yates

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Book Review entertainment news

Berlinale Report

From the Anamorphic Club Cafe at the Berlinale, a Chat Cinema report on festival news.

Cafe at the Anamorphic Cafe

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Cinema

Tribeca 2022

The biggest New York based film festival starts tomorrow. Tribeca unspools for ten days of filmmakers showcasing long and short works.

Tribeca Festival
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Cinema Interview

An Island is the World

I screened THE ISLAND for the International Film Festival Rotterdam. The description of the animated feature read “Non traditional storytelling”. I have to agree. Romanian filmmaker Anca Damian made a film with some outlandish scenes combined modern commentary.

A Black and Paper interview with Director Anca Damian.

What is the human condition of the story?

The film aims to go into depth of humanity: we are all on an island, even if it is a planet- is an island in the Universe – we are all reflecting into each other, we are searching for Paradise, we are all alone… So obviously we are somehow facing a kind of dead end to our civilization, so we have to search our human values, our connections to nature, in order to continue to be.

The Island

How did you you come up with the animation style?

I wanted the reality of the film to be immersive, so the space was developed in 3D, with added fluid elements developed in Houdini – the sea, the clouds. The concept was that everything that is man-made doesn’t integrate in the nature, so we have real textures for plastic, metal, fabric. The same texturing we applied also for the cloth of the characters that are in 2D.

In my concept, only what is made by nature remains painted.

Color wise everything is beautiful, like in a Hawaii holiday, but there is also some malaise, a sick feeling behind the chemical pink of the clouds and the green-blue of the sea.

Were you a fan of Robinson Crusoe?

I can’t say I am a fan of Robinson Crusoe; I am a fan of humankind; Exploring Robinson and Friday connection in a setup of nowadays, allowed me to explore a version of Robinson who has the best of intentions, but who is saving who, that’s another story.

The language of the film was playful, then dashing, did I get this right?

Yes, you got it right: the child in us is paying and telling the truth, I always listen to the child me, and keep him close. I wanted the audience will do the same, go in playful way straight forward to the so much needed truth.

The Island screens in The Big Screen Competition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2022.