At the Tribeca Festival, New York City Was the Main Character

Since its inception in 2002, the Tribeca Festival has doubled as a love letter to the city that made it. In the film fest’s 25th year, the city wrote back. Madonna took over Times Square, the Knicks won their first NBA title in 53 years while the festival took place, and Alicia Keys sent everyone home with “Empire State of Mind,” all inside twelve days that left even the most self-mythologizing of cities a little giddy.

The festival kicked off on Wednesday, June 3, with the premiere of Earth, Wind & Fire (To Be Celestial vs. That’s the Weight of the World), the latest music documentary from Tribeca staple Questlove. On Friday, nearly 3,000 Madonna fans mobbed the Beacon Theatre to attend the premiere of her ten-minute short film linked to her forthcoming album, Confessions II. Fresh off her performance the night before in Times Square, which was sponsored by Grindr and featured a mix of new songs and classic hits, including “I Love New York,” Madonna also attended the Tribeca event, sitting down for an intimate Q&A with Anderson Cooper following the screening.

The festival also neatly coincided with an unabashed wellspring of hometown pride flowing through the city’s streets as the New York Knicks made it to the NBA finals for the first time in 27 years. Tribeca benefited from this palpable sense of optimism, as celebrities, audiences, and film industry insiders attended its various programming throughout the week.

There was the Tribeca Artists Dinner, an annual event hosted by festival sponsor Chanel, which featured TV screens showing Game 3 of the finals and saw attendees like Ayo Edebiri, Alex Consani, Teyana Taylor, Keke Palmer, and Sarah Pidgeon wearing orange-and-blue merch over their tweed jackets.

Then there was the festival’s closing night, which featured Alicia Keys’s autobiographical documentary Alicia Keys: Girl From Hell’s Kitchen, a film that’s as much about the history of her native neighborhood as the story of her own personal come-up. The premiere took place while the Knicks were battling the Spurs in Game 5 in San Antonio; as they clinched the championship trophy for the first time since 1973, jubilant screening attendees walked over to the gala and de facto victory party at Capitale, where Keys and Nas took the stage to perform a riotous rendition of the city’s unofficial anthem, “Empire State of Mind.”

The best of the festival’s film programming also celebrated the city and all its idiosyncratic characters. In particular, four documentaries exploring different aspects of underground NYC culture offered an illuminating look at the metropolis’s lesser-known corners—and one more mainstream one, from a new perspective.

With Jean-Michel, a documentary that included the personal stories of Basquiat’s two younger sisters, audiences were given an especially intimate look at the New York scenes—from 1960s brownstone Brooklyn to 1980s downtown Manhattan—which formed the late artist’s sensibility. The film traces how his upbringing as the child of a strict Haitian immigrant father and a Puerto Rican (though native New Yorker) mother informed Basquiat’s approach to art and commerce, while his time spent navigating the many public schools he attended and, later, the streets of Manhattan as a burgeoning artist, influenced his prolific creative output. Icons of the city, such as Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, and Madonna, all make appearances in Jean-Michel, which has already been acquired by Netflix.

In Bang My Box: The Robin Byrd Story, directors Jyllian Gunther and Stephanie Schwam travel to 1977, when Byrd’s groundbreaking call-in variety show first started airing on New York’s cable access Channel J. Extensive interviews with the preternaturally affable Byrd are spliced with cuts from the thousands of hours of footage preserved on a dusty, precious collection of 3/4 inch tapes she’s in the process of finally digitizing. The clips are a time capsule of a long-gone era, when Times Square was for peep shows and prostitution, and porn hadn’t yet become available at the tap of a finger on your phone. Byrd was a pioneer of sex positivity and a champion of free speech, fighting the attempted censorship of her show and incorporating practical safe sex tips into her programming when AIDS began ravaging the queer community. The film follows Byrd’s journey from downtown New York to Fire Island, where she lives today.

Another enduring fixture of local New York television, entertainment journalist George Carroll Whipple III, was given his flowers with Whipple’s World. The documentary features interviews with the 71-year-old red-carpet reporter for NY1, known as much for his ballsy, folksy reporting style as for his trademark wild eyebrows. Whipple embodies the regal provincialism certain city characters acquire, becoming a celebrity in his own right and beloved by the A-list stars he interviewed, even as he never gave up his day job as an employment lawyer. It’s only fitting that the film premiered at Tribeca, where Whipple has been reporting since its debut.

And finally, threeASFOUR, directed by Sean Lennon, is ostensibly about the avant-garde fashion collective that’s been working and living as one pod since 1998, but it’s really about the most New York narrative of all: the rent. Lennon followed the remaining three members of the original As Four—Gabriel Asfour, Angela Donhauser, and Adi Gil, with the erstwhile Kai Khüne providing a solo interview—for five years, as they raced against the competing interests of their purist creative vision of uniting the world with couture and their landlord’s lawsuit against them for back rent on their industrial loft, the mythologized “Silver Cage” in Chinatown. Juxtaposing the constant hum of activity outside the loft—people playing pickup basketball and practicing tai chi in the park just outside the windows—with the relentless pressure of fashion week, threeASFOUR turns what could be a bleak story about capitalism into a triumph of creative ambition.