{"id":23417,"date":"2024-06-17T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-06-17T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=23417"},"modified":"2024-06-18T19:32:19","modified_gmt":"2024-06-19T02:32:19","slug":"tribeca-dispatch-growing-up-and-looking-back","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/tribeca-dispatch-growing-up-and-looking-back\/","title":{"rendered":"Tribeca Dispatch: Growing Up and Looking Back"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A few days before its conclusion yesterday, the Tribeca Festival announced its 2024 competition winners, and the big one was Griffin in Summer<\/em><\/strong>, which took the Founders Award for Best U.S. Narrative Feature, as well as the Best Screenplay in a U.S. Narrative Feature to writer\/director Nicholas Colia, who also received a Special Jury Mention for New Narrative Director. This seems, to this viewer at least, a bit of an overreaction to a perfectly serviceable indie coming-of-age comedy\/drama of the Rushmore \/ Rocket Science<\/em> school, but as I mentioned in this space last week, the narrative choosings at this particular festival tend to be a bit slim.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And Griffin<\/em> is a good film, once you get past the title character\u2019s aggressive obnoxiousness, which is a bit of a hurdle early on. We first meet him onstage at a high school talent show, performing an excerpt from his newest play, a Who\u2019s Afraid of Virginia Woolf<\/em>-style domestic misery drama; it\u2019s titled Regrets of Autumn<\/em>, a perfect pretentious-kid play title. He plans to spend his summer mounting a production of it in his small town in upstate New York, to which his exasperated mother (Melanie Lynskey, pitch-perfect as always) sighs, \u201cSweetie, don\u2019t you want to do anything else<\/em> this summer?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eventually he does, much to his surprise, and ultimately, improbably, you can\u2019t help but feel bad for this poor kid. Griffin in Summer<\/em> is a little strained in spots, but it\u2019s a genuinely involving narrative that knows from its community theater milieu (Colia and his cast are beautifully attuned to allllll the various strains of bad acting). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen do you think we\u2019ll know when we\u2019re grown up?\u201d Jasmine (Jasmine Bearkiller Shangreaux) asks. We first meet Jasmine \u2014 or Jazzy<\/em><\/strong>, as she and the film about her are called \u2014 on her seventh birthday, and spend a bit of time with her before jumping ahead to her tenth. She\u2019s Oglala Lakota, living in a mobile home park in South Dakora, down the way from her best friend Syriah (Syriah Fool Head Means), who is also Native.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s no real plot to speak of, just vibes: how it feels to be this age, the purity of the friendships, the blurriness of the days, the utter expendability of adults (who are, almost across the board, heard but not seen). It\u2019s not that nothing occurs. Their friendship is tested, first by a dispute between parents, then by Syriah moving away; Jazzy is asked out by a boy for the first time; she gets her first period.  But these are just things that happen, as they do in real life, and director Morrisa Maltz\u2019s scenes are so keenly observed and casually staged that long stretches (especially early on) play like documentary. (It\u2019s certainly not a coincidence that Shangreaux and Means share their characters\u2019 names, especially since they each get a story credit). But these are genuine performances by charismatic actors \u2014 they craft a credible BFF dynamic \u2014 and executive producer Lily Gladstone (who starred in Maltz\u2019s earlier The Unknown Country<\/em>) makes a late but welcome appearance as well. This is a luminous, lovely piece of work. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

On the documentary side, you\u2019re unlikely to see a picture more harrowing and intense, fiction- or non-, than Joshua Zeman\u2019s Checkpoint Zoo<\/em><\/strong>, which concerns the Feldman Ecopark, housing more than five thousand species, just outside Kharkiv, Ukraine. The popular zoo hit an immediate crisis when Russian invaded in February 2022, shelling the Ecopark and the surrounding area early and often, leaving the animals to die without electricity or running water. Zeman tells the story of their evacuations to other zoos in those early days of the conflict, initially by daredevil volunteers working with limited resources (like half-doses of anesthetic, which makes for some hairy escapes) until going viral prompted donations and assistance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some of the editing and sound choices are a touch shopworn, but the footage is extraordinary, with a you-are-there immediacy that creates genuine high stakes and nail-biting suspense. And it\u2019s a genuinely inspiring story, of dedicated people who risk everything to help animals who probably shouldn\u2019t be in this war zone to begin with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the best documentary I saw at Tribeca this year was Kimberly Reed\u2019s I\u2019m Your Venus<\/em><\/strong>, which probably shouldn\u2019t come as a surprise, since it\u2019s essentially a follow-up to one of the greatest documentaries of all time, Jennie Livingston\u2019s Paris is Burning<\/em>. One of the key subjects of that film was Venus Xtravaganza, a young trans woman coming up through the NYC ballroom scene who was murdered in 1988, before the film\u2019s release. That murder remains unsolved, so Reed follows Venus\u2019s three brothers \u2014 middle-aged, half-Italian, half-Puerto Rican tough guys from Jersey City \u2014 as they try to get, per the opening titles, \u201cinformation about how Venus died – and how she lived.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It sounds like the set-up for a true crime documentary, but that angle is ultimately a red herring; I\u2019m Your Venus<\/em> is less about the former half of that opening line than the latter. Venus came from an abusive, contentious household, and her brothers initially did not offer her the love and acceptance she needed. She found that from her friends at House Xtravaganza, so they connect with the current members there to make things right, owning up to mistakes and regrets, because \u201cshe deserves it.\u201d Those scenes are raw, and thorny, and emotional, making I\u2019m Your Venus<\/em> less a Paris is Burning<\/em> sequel than a timely examination of trans acceptance and visibility. I was a sobbing mess through the entire back half of this beautiful documentary, and anyone with a heart and a pulse will likely meet the same fate. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our final report from Tribeca Festival includes mini-reviews of “Jazzy,” “Checkpoint Zoo,” and multi-award winner “Griffin in Summer.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":531,"featured_media":23420,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1416],"tags":[1419],"class_list":["post-23417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-festivals","tag-film-fests"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/531"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23417"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23417\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23428,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23417\/revisions\/23428"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23420"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}