We are deep into summer festival season!
This month, three journalists from The Rolling Tape covered the Tribeca Festival, which took place from June 4 to 15, celebrating a variety of genres in film, television, music, and immersive experiences. Our coverage included films in the competing categories, including U.S. Narrative, International Narrative, Documentary, Viewpoints, Escape from Tribeca, and Shorts.
Below, we each reflect on and break down our coverage focuses, from environmental storytelling to feminist cinema, discussing the major takeaways we each gained from the independent film festival.
To hear more about our experience at Tribeca, you can also listen to our recap featuring our friend Larry Fried here.
Danny Jarabek – Movies about the Environment
Environmental storytelling has never been more essential and urgent. As we face the accelerating realities of climate change, deforestation, extreme heat, species loss, and global resource crises, storytelling–particularly through the emotional resonance of film–becomes a powerful vehicle for shaping public consciousness and inspiring collective action. Climate activism is not just about reporting facts; it’s about making those facts tangible, relatable, and actionable for everyone. By providing a platform where these narratives can reach new audiences and ignite conversations, festivals like Tribeca play a critical role in elevating this type of programming and offering a space for education, activism, and reflection. Filmmakers can experiment with genre, perspective, and scale in the way they approach ecological themes.
To highlight the significance of this, look no further than Tribeca’s choice for its Closing Night Gala this year, YANUNI. Produced by Malaika Pictures and Appian Way (Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company known for its focus on social and environmental issues), YANUNI demonstrates the festival’s commitment to placing environmental narratives at the forefront of its programming mission. The film is directed by Richard Ladkani (Sea of Shadows, The Ivory Game), who set out to continue his legacy of environmental documentation by approaching the story of the Amazon rainforest.
Eventually, through extensive research, he was introduced to the story of Juma Xipaia, a bold advocate for Indigenous rights to land autonomy and environmental protections who has defended her people’s ancestral land against relentless encroachment from illegal mining practices. The film is a bold and emotionally textured portrait of her bravery and the collective efforts of Indigenous people in Brazil to safeguard the Earth for their family and the next generation of inhabitants.
To learn more about YANUNI and its goals, listen to my interview with Ladkani and Xipaia here.
When we think about large-scale, global environmental phenomena, the sheer scale can often feel overwhelming and paralyzing. It’s hard to comprehend how individual actions ripple out to affect the planet. Oftentimes, it’s valuable to trace the impact of something small or familiar to comprehend its wider consequences. That is precisely what director Nicholas Bruckman exemplifies with the limited series The Price of Milk.
The series screened the first three of four episodes in the NOW Special Screenings section of the festival, featuring exactly that type of documentarian analysis through one of America’s most commonplace consumer products: milk. Bruckman pulls viewers into a layered investigation of supply chains, agricultural practices, corporate influence, and personal choice, all while grounding the story in a product that audiences know firsthand. The vast web of the dairy industry and its long-running financial connections to the U.S. government is a startling discovery that evidences just how intertwined environmental issues are with financial institutions, corporate lobbying, and governmental policy.
Listen to my interview with director Nicholas Bruckman here.
Environmentalism, like any other critical social or justice movement, does not exist in a vacuum. It intersects with labor, culture, gender, economics, and more. Toby Perl Freilich’s Maintenance Artist acknowledges this dichotomy in a meaningful way, tracking the life and legacy of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, the first and only artist-in-reisdence for New York City’s Sanitation Department. Ukeles’s art is rooted in the politics of care, feminism, and urban systems — domains often overlooked in both environmental and art discourses. The film not only preserves her story through archiving her groundbreaking public art career but also reorients our understanding of how we can reframe our creativity and imagination to make a difference in the lives of everyday people. Maintenance Artist expresses the intersectional quality of care — care for each other, our planet, and the people who preserve it.
While documentaries remain a cornerstone of environmental storytelling to raise awareness of the climate crisis, fiction plays an equally critical role in shaping our collective role in environmentalism. Historically, speculative fiction — especially science fiction — has provided fertile ground to extrapolate the environmental anxieties of our present into the landscapes of an imagined future. These narratives allow us to visualize alternative outcomes, cautionary tales, and new worlds shaped by climate collapse, often creating an emotional proximity to issues that might otherwise feel abstract. The Wolf, the Fox, and the Leopard does exactly this. It’s a bold exercise from director David Verbeek in environmental imagination where a young girl raised in the isolated wilderness enters human civilization to become the chosen one in a story of resilience, loss, and the clashes between nature, technology, and culture.
Jessica Reynolds’ physical prowess at the center of the narrative is rapturous in translating the sharp juxtaposition of symbolic environmental purity against a world that may be forever broken.
Arleigh Rodgers — Finding Oneself at Tribeca
My favorite films at Tribeca this year were those that focused on moments of self-reflection, illustrating characters who face a change, slight or substantial, in their understanding of themselves.
On A String, a portrait of a young viola player searching for her next life turn, perhaps best resembles the ways that changes in understanding oneself can range from the minor can feel monumental. Talented and dedicated, Isabel (Isabel Hagan) lives with her music-obsessed family and prepares to audition for the New York Philharmonic. Meanwhile, she tutors a girl whose father takes an uncomfortable interest in her. Hagan, who wrote and directed the feature, portrays Isabel’s stumbling and endearing forays with the sort of brashness and determination reminiscent of Greta Gerwig’s work with Noah Baumbach, including Frances Ha or Mistress America. But Hagan’s work — which won the festival’s Best Screenplay in a U.S. Narrative Feature — elevates the mumblecore aesthetic we might think of for Gerwig’s and Baumbach’s films. On A String soars with tender reproach, a taut bow string that, when it strikes a harmonious chord, makes us hear the heart and grit of the player behind the movement.
Another award-winner from the festival is Charliebird, a stirring if sentimental character story of a music therapist-nurse, Al (Samantha Smart), and Charlie (Gabriela Ochoa Perez), a teenage patient who’s been sick nearly all her life. Their jaded personalities meld and clash as their personal histories and approach to living their lives discover balance during Charlie’s brief stay at the Texas hospital where Al works.
Directed by Libby Ewing and written by Smart, the film won the festival’s Best U.S. Narrative Feature and Perez its Best Performance in a U.S. Narrative Feature. I could not agree more with the jury’s comment on newcomer Perez’s performance:
“This actor delivers a fresh performance that is at once ferocious and vulnerable. She grounds a young woman’s painful journey in humanity and truth.”
I also had the pleasure of reviewing the animated folk horror Dog of God and interviewing its directors Raitis and Lauris Abele. This Latvian take on the werewolf story — a reclamation of folklore in the Baltic region, the directors told me — is a frenzied and psychedelic tale told in mesmerizing rotoscope animation.
Chris Merola’s debut, Lemonade Blessing, was another standout from this year’s festival. You can read about why I loved its excellent acting, comedic storytelling, and striking character-driven arcs here.
Sara Ciplickas – Movies by Women and About Women
In a somewhat self-indulgent manner, I focused on covering films either about women or by women, aiming to continue amplifying feminist cinema. With that in mind, I also aimed to cover female-led documentaries, as these films often fall under the radar for audiences and, admittedly, myself. Thus, I had a rather narrow scope for Tribeca, resulting in a wonderful exploration of feminist fights and experimental storytelling.
When tackling documentaries, I categorized my screenings into two approaches to storytelling: traditional interviews and observational methods. Ultimately, I found the observational methods more effective, connecting me intimately with the subjects. Coincidentally, or perhaps on purpose, the two most impactful films I covered, State of Firsts by Chase Joynt and Widow Champion by Zippy Kimundu, chose the observational approach to evolving subjects. The stories unfolded before the director’s eyes: Women, on opposite sides of the world, facing adversity and fighting for a change. Both directors explained that the intentional observational approach was used to build trust with the subjects. Refreshingly, both films offered a chance to sit, ponder in silence, and draw conclusions based only on what we experienced.
Be sure to check out my review of State of Firsts here and my colleague’s review from DC/DOX on Widow Champion here. Additionally, you can listen to my discussion with Chase and discussion with Zippy about their films.
Alternatively, two films that focused more on past subjects with definitive starts and ends chose to follow a more traditional documentary style, loaded with testimonials. It’s Dorothy! by Jeffrey McHale and Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything by Jackie Jesko focuses on historical subjects, Dorothy Gale and Barbara Walters, women in entertainment (fictional and real) who changed media forever. And while the “talking heads” approach was less engaging than the observational approaches to storytelling, they made sense for their subjects, offering retrospectives from those who interacted with the women the most.
That brings me to my favorite title from Tribeca, Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print. All of the films I covered reminded me of the power of media, perception, and composure, and this film, directed by three different women, dives into that topic headfirst. Dear Ms. analyzes various cover stories as it details the history of the beginning of Ms. Magazine. Utilizing both traditional testimonials to build the story with more contemporary visual collages, Dear Ms. scratched all the right places for this young female journalist.
And while all five films mentioned above offer different insights into femininity in the media and fights for equality, I found the composure and strength exhibited by all women to be nothing less than brilliantly impactful. The documentaries were respectful, confident, and didn’t turn suffering or adversity into a spectacle. Women on this screen didn’t just have to sit pretty and cry to convey all the emotions they had. There was dignity in every film, and I encourage you all to visit all of these titles as soon as possible.
Reflection Courtesy of Danny Jarabek, Arleigh Rodgers, and Sara Ciplickas
Feature Image Credit to ‘Widow Champion’ and Zippy Kimundu
Recent Comments