This just in: there are actually some great movies in Tribeca this year. As a festival programmer, I sympathize with Tribeca’s plight of being the third US premiere festival in the calendar year, and I wish I didn’t continuous hear complaints from other journalists about their programming. However, in an unfortunate turn of events for both the filmmakers and their publicists, I can’t really tell you about all the great movies, due to Tribeca’s embargo on reviews of all world premieres before the films screen publicly for the first time. Perhaps the embargo was a reaction to all the negative criticism, a move made in an effort to help ticket sales for movies that could possibly get bad press, but vicious cycles are the worst thing in the world and they make me sad for all the parties involved.

So, here we are now with nothing to cover but the program itself (and the embargo, of course). And instead of reviewing the quality of the films in the midnight program, I’m just gonna review the section as its own entity.

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I stumbled across this story via the FILMMAKER Mag blog: in a lengthy story for the Contra Costa Times, Mary F. Pols talks to a number of female filmmakers, from super-indie to mega-Hollywood, about working in a business that is still overwhelmingly run by dudes. There’s a lot of good stuff in the piece, but an anecdote from actress/director Julie Delpy particularly caught my eye.

Delpy’s second feature film as writer/director, 2 Days in Paris, opens in the U.S. next month. Festival buzz has generally been positive, but no one who’s seen the thing can overlook the similarities between it and the film that marks Delpy’s greatest triumph as an actress, Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset. Well, turns out, there’s a reason for that. After working for some of world cinema’s greatest directors and attending NYU film school, Delpy “had a drawer full of scripts that reflected her love of science fiction and other nongirlie topics”–none of which she could find financing for. Then, as Pols tells it,

[A] friend suggested she write a script that bore some similarity to Before Sunset, the successful 2004 film Delpy had starred in and co-written. She had shared an Oscar nomination for the screenplay, and her friend’s supposition was that financiers would feel “safe” with a project that seemed like Before Sunset.
The trick paid off. Delpy wrote 40 pages of a relationship farce set in Paris, which she then shopped around. She found financing for it in Germany. The result is 2 Days in Paris. [...]
“This is why my first film is a romantic comedy,” said Delpy, now 37, with evident exasperation. “It is only because it is the first time people will give me money to make a film. People will trust a woman to do something with a relationship more than they will to do something with a war story or science fiction.”

Delpy goes on explain that she’d “sell out to direct a big action movie” in a heartbeat. Her lifelong dream, she says, is to make a film like Blade Runner. “But you need money to make Blade Runner.”

Ignoring, for a moment, that Delpy probably shouldn’t be whining about how the big boys won’t give her money to make a summer tentpole before her first real feature is even released, I’d be fascinated to see what kinds of scripts are lying dormant in other filmmakers’ drawers. Does Harmony Korine have a high school comedy that no one wants to pay for? Does Sofia Coppola secretly want to remake Raging Bull? And considering how many relatively nameless, style-less directors are handed “big action movies” these days, does demonstrable competence in a specific genre actually hurt more than it helps?

OK, I must admit: I’m super excited. I just spent time perusing the Waterfront Film Festival program, and so much of it sounds so good that I’ve developed this underlying frantic excitement in my belly. It makes me realize how bereft I am when it comes to having access to truly intriguing, unexpected films–the kind that leave you feeling different about everything you think and hear and see.

What I’m most excited about in terms of Waterfront is the line-up of short films. My experience with the genre is limited, but I already have an affection for them, spilling over from my love for short stories. What I love about short stories is how compact they are–how quickly they get to the heart of the matter and make you feel something, make you connect with someone.

Take some of the shorts that will be at Waterfront: Unhitched, a documentary about the residents of Faerie Ring Campground and RV Park, tucked away in the Redwoods, which serves as one of the only options for low income housing in its Northern California region. Twelve minutes long. Or Lighten Up, in which a man confesses to his best friend what he is doing to handle his life’s challenges. Told in eight minutes. Or Losing Lusk, the story of the least populated county in the country’s least populated state, Wyoming. Told in five minutes. And Twitch, which introduces us to a young girl torn between two worlds: her domestic life where she cares for her wheelchair-bound mother, and her escape into the world of sexuality with her eager boyfriend. Ten minutes.

Is anyone else amazed by this? That we can be told anything, become connected to a character, or be transported in any sense in such short bursts of time? I’m amazed. Kudos to the makers of short films. Let’s put our heads together to figure out how to see more of this genre outside of film festivals. Any ideas?