Socially conscious documentaries at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival perceptively examined female roles and the culture wars, and brought well-deserved attention to unconventional heroes.
Nisha Pahuja’s The World Before Her, the festival’s Best Documentary Feature winner, adds considerable depth to the usual superficial contrasts of Indian women as either Bollywood stars or slumdogs. The beautiful contestants […]
Documentaries about athletes and ruggedly macho jobs won awards at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival and were also popular with audiences. In Wavumba (“they who smell of fish” in Swahili), Best New Documentary Director Jeroen van Velzen finds the spiritual aspects of traditional shark hunting off the coast of Kenya through shamans and the eyes […]
Directed by Mark Meatto
Produced by Michael Bohlmann & Meatto
Released by International Film Circuit
USA/UK. 88 min. Not Rated
How to Grow a Band has a promising story to follow. A young, gifted musician rises from a narrow genre to commercial success, falls into personal turmoil, and finds catharsis with a new mode of artistic expression. But this […]
Directed by Daniel Nettheim
Produced by Vincent Sheehan
Written by Alice Addison, original adaptation by Wain Fimeri and Nettheim, based on the novel by Julia Leigh
Released by Magnolia Pictures
Australia. 101 min. Rated R
With Willem Dafoe, Frances O’Connor, Sam Neill, Finn Woodlock, Morgana Davies & Sullivan Stapleton
The Hunter is set in motion by a cold corporate conspiracy […]
Directed by Luc Besson
Produced by Virginie Besson-Silla & Andy Harries
Written by Rebecca Frayn
Released by Cohen Media Group
France/UK. 127 min. Rated R
English & Burmese with English subtitles
With Michelle Yeoh, David Thewlis, Benedict Wong, Jonathan Raggett, Jonathan Woodhouse & Htun Lin
The Lady was originally intended to help bring Aung San Suu Kyi, the singular embodiment of […]
Written & Directed by Jannicke Systad Jacobsen, based on the novel Fa Meg Pa, For Faen! by Olaug Nilssen
Produced by Brede Hovland & Sigve Endresen
Released by New Yorker Films
Norwegian with English subtitles
Norway. 76 min. Not Rated
With Helene Bergsholm, Malin Bjorhovde, Beate Stofring, Matias Myren, Lars Nordtveit Listau & Henriette Steenstrup
In this refreshing take on […]
Directed by Lee Hirsch
Written & Produced by Hirsch & Cynthia Lowen
Released by the Weinstein Company
USA. 98 min. Not Rated
Bully goes to the frontlines of the war on middle and high school kids who don’t fit in. The embedded filmmakers expose the battles they and their families face, survive, or, even worse, lose.
The prologue establishes that […]
Directed by Jon Shenk
Produced by Richard Berge & Bonni Cohen
Released by Samuel Goldwyn Films
English & Dhievi with English subtitles
USA. 101 min. Rated PG
The Island President makes climate change dramatic, political, personal, and the right stuff of leadership. The imminent future of the 400,000 people who live on the beautiful islands of the Maldives […]
Written & Directed by Joseph Cedar
Produced by David Mandil, Moshe Edery & Leon Edery
Released by Sony Pictures Classics
Israel. 105 min. Rated PG
Hebrew with English subtitles
With Shlomo Bar Aba, Lior Ashkenazi, Alisa Rosen, Alma Zak, Daniel Markovich, Micah Lewesohn, Yuval Scharf & Nevo Kimchi
Academic politics is said to be the most vicious because the stakes are […]
