Festivals 07 May 2006 09:15 am
Tribeca Endings
- Last night The Tribeca Film Festival closed out with their award show. (Actually it didn’t quite end – I have another screening of my film this morning.) It was held in a large Chinese restaurant called The Golden Bridge (nowhere near San Francisco but just across the street from the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge). It was one of the largest restaurants I’ve ever been in. We were seated at a table near the entrance where we could easily view most of the celebs as they entered. However, like most Chinatown restaurants, there was the constant banging into you as waiters and others squeezed by to get to another place. The food kept coming, and it was mostly good, but no one knew what it was we were eating, and the waiters couldn’t speak English.
Once the food was done, the awards began. This is the only festival I’ve encountered that gives out actual art as the award. I won’t always hang my certificates, but I will hang an Alex Katz or a Jeff Koons. (To see what the awards look like go here.)
They didn’t give an award for animation (most of the animated films were out of competition) but did for short – narrative and documentary. It totally confused the film makers sitting alongside us when they were named winners for “best documentary narrative”. They hadn’t realized they’d made a documentary. It turns out it was just the person calling out the winner who’d made a mistake. (“The Shovel” by Nick Childs – Director, Writer, Producer and Steve Hardwick – Producer.)
As a matter of fact the real best documentary winners sat on the other side of us. (“Native New Yorker” by William Susman – Producer/Composer and Steve Bilich – director.) A lucky table.
We’d spent a couple of hours talking to these guys on both sides of us, so when they’d won we couldn’t have been happier.
After the awards, they shuffled everyone into the open-bar room (a large but not-as-large) room where everyone was comfortably but tightly packed. They cleared the tables out of the larger room, but, of course, most stayed in the back room. Heidi was spotted by a friend she hadn’t seen in the last five years, and the two of them caught up. Her husband, it turns out, was the audio mixer for Dreamworks’ Over The Hedge, so the two of us chatted for a bit. Small world – no matter how far you run away from the animation, it’s always catching up with you.
- Tonight we’ll really catch up with animation as ASIFA East hosts their festival. It’ll be interesting to see who shows up at this event; usually most of the town’s animation types make an appearance. Certainly it’ll be fun.
