The Tribeca premiere of “This Time This Place” marked the first time Radio City Music hall was opened since the pandemic.
Tribeca Festival, the first in-person film festival in the U.S. since the pandemic, closed out its 20th edition with a tribute to a small town in the midwest. Filmmakers Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar, the Oscar winners behind “American Factory,” took the stage at New York’s iconic Radio City Music Hall to introduce their new documentary to a fully vaccinated and mostly mask-less crowd. “We live in a small town in Ohio,” Bognar told the nearly 6,000 audience members in attendance. “We have a neighbor. His name is Dave. We seem him at the grocery store.” That Dave, of course, is Dave Chappelle. As Reichert and Bognar tell it, the comedian appeared on their doorstep about a year ago to see if the directors were interested in documenting his experiment to carefully bring back live events during quarantine. “I literally just knocked on their door the same way Black people do when they’re having barbecues,” Chappelle cracked to audience. “‘Hey, I’m having a barbecue. Can I borrow some hotdogs, neighbor?’” Chappelle’s efforts, initially intended to be a weekend-long event, resulted in more than 50 sold-out outdoor and socially distanced comedy shows over the summer in the provincial town of Yellow Springs. Set up in a friend’s five-acre cornfield, Chappelle hosted famous friends such as Chris Rock, Kevin Hart, Jon Stewart, Tiffany Haddish and Michelle Wolf to reintroduce stand-up in the COVID era. As the movie documents, extensive safety precautions, including swab tests, were taken.
