Why has it taken me four months to get around to finally putting down into words my reaction to the second Tribeca Film Festival? It was a very different festival this year: bigger and less personal, especially for me, as a member of the press. Last year, the press attended public screenings and were given access to panel discussions and the hospitality tent -- this year, it was mostly separate press screenings for us, panels were off-limits to all but the biggest and most important journalists, and the hospitality tent was out of bounds. Last year, I felt more a part of the festival -- I met filmmakers and other journalists in the hospitality tent whom I wouldn't have met otherwise, and I got to experience the films with members of the public, which is very different than seeing them with the same few members of the NYC film press I see at screenings all the time. Even those press screenings during the festival were sparsely attended -- it seems many critics and journalists had caught the films at the heavy prefestival schedule of screenings that I hadn't been able to get to.
I really shouldn't complain about it -- the festival was much more heavily attended this year, and its schedule was far more intensive. There's lots of critics and press folk in NYC who needed to see these films, and there's no way all of them could have been accommodated at public screenings -- there'd be no room for the public. Things had to be organized this way purely for reasons of logistics. But for me -- as a critic who hasn't been jaded, as I think plenty others have, who still loves the simple act of "going to the movies" and talking to other people who love going to the movies -- it just wasn't the same.
But here we are, back around at a September 11 again, and the festival is back at the forefront of my mind. Tribeca and the festival are intimately tied up in that September 11 two years ago, attempting to bring visitors and New Yorker alike back to that devastated neighborhood. And there's so much bad and sad news still breaking: More human remains were just found at Ground Zero. The family of the last firefighter who remained uneulogized gave up on any of his remains being identified and finally held his funeral. We learned that the EPA, at the direction of the White House, flat-out lied about how dangerous the smoke and the dust at Ground Zero really were. (At the first Tribeca Film Festival, I complained about how choking the merest particles of dust were eight months after the attack and five months after the fires were out.) We've all heard about "firefighter cough" and about how many of those who worked at Ground Zero are now on permanent disability, but then there's this. It's anecdotal (I heard it from a friend who has a firefighter friend), but it's one of those whispers that's been flittering around NYC for months: There are firefighters who are coughing up blood and feeling generally lousy but they're so in love with the very jobs that killed their friends and may be killing them slowly that they refuse to see a doctor, knowing that doctor will invariably put them on desk duty.
It may be a minor contribution in the grand scheme of things, but maybe it's still worth letting everyone who's not in NYC know what it's like downtown.
