Movies Made in New York City
Tribeca Festival Rewards Films In and About the City and Boroughs
May 18, 2008
If many of the films of the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival seemed to share a strong sense of place, in one area at least this is what the organizers intended. The Made in New York Narrative Award at the festival is given each year to an outstanding film that is, as the name indicates, shot on location in New York City.
The Point of the Tribeca Film Festival
The Made In New York Narrative category is a natural outgrowth of the festival’s original raison d’etre. Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal began the festival in the wake of Sept. 11 in order to stimulate interest in returning to Lower Manhattan and, more specifically, to showcase films made in New York City.
Seven years in, the festival has grown much too big for its original Tribeca environs; this year, the screenings primarily took place in the East Village and around Union Square, where mega-theaters made it possible to run the festival screenings alongside the usual first-run releases.
Many of the Made in New York Narrative films illuminated areas of the city that aren’t typically depicted on film.
Can an architect find true love in Brooklyn?
“Life in Flight,” for example, the story of a married architect who begins to question the direction of his life as he ponders partnering up with a prominent real estate developer and meets an insecure but gifted interior decorator, was shot on location in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The architect is working on a large, troubled project in Greenpoint, which is also where his quirky would-be lover lives. The movie is also shot in Greenwich Village in the architect's apartment, which the movie stipulates is at "37 Bank St. between Charles and Waverley" (this address actually exists; it's between Waverley and West 4th St.); and even, briefly, in an apartment in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn.
Hotel rehab seen through the eyes of New York’s quirky and poignant residents
“Hotel Gramercy Park” is a documentary by Douglas Keeve, best known for "Unzipped," his doc chronicling the frenzied runup to a fashion show by Keeve's then-lover, Isaac Mizrahi, and more recently, "Seamless," which follows the struggles of then-obscure designers Doo-Ri and Proenza Schouler as they compete for the CFDA-Vogue Fashion Fund.
The new documentary traces the refurbishment of the legendary Gramercy Park Hotel as it’s transformed by boutique hotelier and onetime one-half of the team behind Studio 54, Ian Schrager.
Although beset by the expected neighborhood outcry against changing a neighborhood landmark – and creating intense noise and sight pollution with the demolition – the movie also offers the poignancy of the lives of the remaining family of the hotel’s original owners. Three of the family members have died tragic deaths, and the rest of the family, still living in the hotel, still holding on, tries vainly to quash its demons and move on.
Simultaneously, Keeve tells us the story of the hotel’s longtime inhabitants, monthly renters who, for reasons not explained, are allowed to stay on at the hotel both during and after its renovation from falling-down, faded has-been to glamorous sleek debutante, complete with decor by artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel (who also turns up in another festival film made in New York, "Guest of Cindy Sherman").
No character quirk is left unexploited, providing us a specific glimpse of New York weirdness: the bitter neighbors, the septuagenarian ladies who gamely down martinis at the bar, the bizarre hotel dwellers.
Lost in Queens, searching for Reina, the Queen
“Paraiso Travel” shows still another side of New York life, the life of struggling immigrants in Queens--but not exactly by way of Ellis Island.
In this dramatic and lively but also somewhat maddening and ultimately unkind story, a bourgeois young man from Medellin, Colombia, follows his vulgar, sexy ladylove on a harrowing, devastating trip through Mexico and across the border into the U.S., only to get lost his first day after a run-in with the police over a language-barrier misunderstanding.
The film follows the hero’s dogged attempts to reconnect with his lost love, even as he builds friendships in the expat Colombian and Latino community in Queens and begins to build a life for himself.
There is nothing glamorous about this New York City, and the only familiar shot takes place in Times Square as the hero is traveling by bus and, thinking he sees his girl, jumps off for a closer look. Here, the movie looks very much as if the director had shot it "as is"; that is, without permits from the city, closing streets off and the like, but merely by following his actor with a handheld camera in order to convey the confused and desperate quality of his search.
Statue of Liberty viewed from another angle
“The Caller,” which won the Made In New York Narrative Award, features Red Hook, Brooklyn, in one prominent scene involving a near-death experience and, hauntingly, Red Hook’s most prepossessing feature: unobstructed views of the Statue of Liberty.
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