Tribeca Festival 2024 #1: Group Therapy, Black Table, Hunters on a White Field
Three world premieres open our slate.
June is here, which means it's time for another Tribeca Film Festival. Just like last year, I'll be virtually covering the goings-on and reviewing as many movies as I can.
We begin this first dispatch with two documentaries and one international narrative, all three of which are making their world premieres at the festival.
Group Therapy
We see a set being built — walls put up to construct a makeshift therapist’s office. Some people walk onto the set and get prepped in makeup chairs. A small audience gathers and sits in an intimate space with chairs lined up in a circle. Neil Patrick Harris leads a few people — a group of comedians — inside the space, and as the comedians sit down and take their places, Harris, with a smile, addresses the room, “Well…who wants to start?”
Sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying.
It's a phrase attributed to a million different people and one I repeat aloud often. If something's getting you down, what do we have if we don't have humor?
That's essentially the conceit of Group Therapy, a documentary full of little oft-attributed and misquoted anecdotes like that. It's about the mantras we repeat to ourselves, the ones we live by, in times of need. Six comics sit in a circle (the titular group therapy session) and tell stories, share wisdom, and swap sayings in an attempt to define the intersection between stand-up comedy and mental health struggles. Moderated by Neil Patrick Harris, who is admittedly not a therapist, the group finds the commonalities in their lives, their careers, and their humor.
Going in, I was already familiar with half of the group, Mike Birbiglia, Tig Notaro, and Gary Gulman (I recently recommended Gary's book Misfit, a companion piece to his excellent comedy special The Great Depresh - more than a few stories are repeated) and was quickly introduced to the other half, Atsuko Okatsuka, Nicole Byer, and London Hughes, (I was immediately aware that I knew all of the white comics and none of the people of color, which obviously says something about the industry, but also that I need to do better as a fan of the medium.)
Despite having a variety of hardships that brought them to this room, ranging from battles with depression to breast cancer to infertility to weight struggles to sleepwalking, the group quickly acknowledges that therapy can be for anyone for any reason. This isn't exactly therapy, but it is healing. It's full of discoveries and understandings. And it helps that the group is damn funny. They keep us laughing, but they know that it's also okay to cry.
Black Table
The Commons Dining Hall is undoubtedly one of the images that comes to mind when one thinks of Yale College—a place to eat, hang out and mix. For the Yale students of the 1990s, a group of heavy tables hastily pushed together in the dining hall became known as the Black Table.
Last summer, the United States Supreme Court dismantled affirmative action, decades upon decades of precedent that saw universities consider race in their admissions process to provide a pathway to education for all.
This summer, Black Table premieres at Tribeca to tell the story of Yale's Black students in the '90s, folks creating their own space in a predominantly and historically white institution. They recount stories of the racism they experienced in New Haven, life as outsiders on the campus, and the time they spent together at the lavish dining hall's famous and titular Black Table - the physical representation of the space they carved out. It's a story that is clearly (and unfortunately) more relevant than ever and their testimonies are powerful. Framed by their class reunions, they reminisce on the past and re-examine how the work they did shapes our present and our future.
Pulitzer Prize-winning culture critic Wesley Morris is one of the students featured and therefore one of the talking heads, and I'm sure there aren't many people reading Tribeca Festival reviews who aren't familiar with his work. When it occasionally becomes a Wesley highlight reel, because he's the most famous and award-winningest one, it feels derivative. We hear Wesley talk about race, culture, education, and his life experience all the time. I want to hear more from the people I don't know, those who don't get to tell their stories on chart-topping podcasts and in the New York Times.
The talking head style of documentary is too often ragged-on. While it's never revolutionary filmmaking, there's something special about giving people the space to tell their stories. Directors John Antonio James and Bill Mack let the subjects take us back to those dorms, those classes, and those meals together. The film feels like one of the reunions that it depicts. When you hear real people telling their real stories (like the '52 graduate and former Tuskegee Airman who attended the university long before affirmative action), there's nothing like it. Those testimonies are important.
Hunters on a White Field
Three men go on an extended weekend hunting trip on a remote wooded property. An initial spell of hunting success sharpens their instincts and stirs a sense of rivalry. Then one day they awake to find that all of the animals have vanished and the forest is eerily quiet. The men become obsessed with the idea that the hunt must continue, no matter how dangerous or absurd the consequences.
Hunters on a White Field meets all the criteria of the independent film checklist: small cast, limited locations, big ideas.
Writer/director Sarah Gyllenstierna tells the story of three men who go on a hunting trip together. Alex (Ardalan Esmaili) wants to impress his boss Gregger (Magnus Krepper) on this excursion on Henrik's (Jens Hultén) land. Alex doesn't know anything about hunting, however, and has little inclination for their boorish macho-man ways. When Henrik uses a photograph of his sister-in-law for target practice, for example, Alex walks away. He's got to learn quickly how to hunt and how to keep up with the locker room talk, all while just trying to not embarrass himself. But he knows that he has to nut up or shut up, as the boys would probably say, when they get into the woods.
The woodland setting is a great place to examine these themes of outsiderism, (as well as being a cheap place to shoot that provides a variety of built-in locations.) They're encroaching on the world of the ducks and the deer, asserting their dominance and making their place in the food chain known. Cinematographer Josua Enblom films beautiful scenery scapes and sharp nighttime scenes. It all has this sense of impending doom.
And that's exactly what happens when the animals just...disappear. The toxic masculinity metaphor, where the animals become inconsequential and the men feel the need to hunt each other, is obvious. (I, too, would choose the bear.) They set up rules for the hunt and even provide medical attention when one of them gets shot, but they feel a primal need to show who's the top dog. There's a reason we still tell versions of The Most Dangerous Game (Ready or Not, The Hunt, this film) and that reason is the fact that it works. The metaphor works. The commentary works. I'm not as convinced that this film works as well as the clear and pitch-perfect source material, but they're doing everything right and doing solid work within their limitations.
Group Therapy media courtesy of Tribeca Festival.
Black Table media courtesy of Sunshine Sachs Morgan & Lylis.
Hunters on a White Field media courtesy of Hook Publicity.