The 20th annual festival is not limited to NYC audiences, with many world premiere features and documentaries available to stream at home.
The curtain went up last night on the 2021 Tribeca Festival, and it is both an indoor and outdoor affair. The opening night feature of the festival, “In the Heights,” screened throughout the city on Wednesday, for the most part on portable 40-foot state-of-the-art LED screens in public spaces, prior to its. In fact, virtually all of the festival’s screenings will be held outdoors as a COVID-19 precaution, even as more restrictions on public gatherings are falling in New York. In another pandemic-related adjustment, organizers decided to make much of this year’s festival available to home viewers across the U.S. Many of the 66 features and documentaries making their debut through June 20, as well as shorts programs, TV features and filmmaker Q&As, will be available to stream from their premiere dates through June 23. (The festival is also giving another shot to films whose 2020 festival showcases were disrupted by the pandemic last year, when Tribeca was cancelled, replaced with the cooperative.) Tribeca’s closing night gala, a screening of “Untitled: Dave Chappelle Documentary” on June 19 at Radio City Music Hall, will be open to vaccinated audience members only. Of the films previewed at press time, here are some highlights premiering June 10-12. More reviews will follow in the coming days. “7 Days” (World Premiere) — Two Indian American Millennials, Rita (Geraldine Viswanathan) and Ravi (Karan Soni), go through the motions of their arranged meeting to please their matchmaking parents, but their awkward first date doesn’t quite end, when the arrival of COVID lockdown precludes a smooth departure. Director and co-writer Roshan Sethi gives us a touching and timely rom-com about a couple opening up to one another in spite of themselves, with affecting performances by the two leads, who have to handle the weight of quarantine (and their parents’ even more oppressive expectations) together. Screens June 10 at Brooklyn Commons at MetroTech; available At Home June 11-23. “Tigre Gente” (Online World Premiere) — Filmmaker Elizabeth Unger explores two fronts in the war against the illegal jaguar trade – embedded with a team of rangers on the trail of poachers in Bolivia’s Madidi Park, as they go undercover to root out a smuggling racket; and following Hong Kong-based journalist Laurel Chor, who investigates a market for jaguar teeth in China and Myanmar (where they are sold in lieu of harder-to-get tiger teeth). Chor’s passion for investigating environmental crimes proves to be generational, as her own parents question whether species are actually being decimated for the Chinese market – prompting discussions about guilt, personal responsibility, and cultural prerogatives.
