Tears in the Neighborhood

Abstract

The uncomfortable thing about the Tribeca Film Festival (April 21-May 2, 2010) is that nobody knows exactly what it is for. This may be a problem that it will never solve. It is not prestigious enough to woo any really good stuff away from Cannes, and in any case Venice and Berlin are always vigilant about picking up that festival's scraps. In the U.S., Tribeca does not really pretend to compete with Sundance, and even in New York City, its hometown, the website of the Mayor's Office of Theater, Film, and Broadcasting currently lists forty-six other festivals taking place within the city limits. It wasn't this way at first, of course. Tribeca was founded in the winter of 2002 by Jane Rosenthal and Robert De Niro, who wanted to pump money into a lower Manhattan that had recently been devastated by having planes smashed into it. The founders were very explicit about the primacy of an economic justification for the festival's existence. ““The reason we started the film festival was really to help the economic redevelopment of Lower Manhattan very specifically,”” Rosenthal said to a New York Times reporter in 2003. By that metric, it's hard to see the festival as anything other than an enormous success. In 2006, Tribeca placed twelfth on Forbes magazine's list of the country's most expensive zip codes (median home price: $1.9 million), and as I walked across lower Manhattan from screening to screening, it was easy to see that the neighborhood's success had turned into a more general phenomenon. One Sunday afternoon, in a half-hour break between films, I hopped into something called a Milk Bar and spent sixteen dollars on a sandwich and a cookie. At the other end of the counter, a young man took digital photos of his own sandwich——for a …