How it’s New York: The City gave birth to the fest, formerly known as the Tribeca Film Fest
How it’s Irish: The Tribeca Festival features films, documentaries and shorts from over 36 countries, including Ireland, the UK and Canada
New York welcomed filmmakers, writers, fans, celebrities and more for 12 days of movies, documentaries, Q&As, shorts, talkbacks and more at the festival this June. In the feature film category, Ireland was represented by The Miracle Club, which made its World Premiere at Tribeca. Based on a short story by Jimmy Smallhorne (with a script penned by Joshua D. Maurer, Timothy Prager and Smallhorne) and directed by Thaddeus O’Sullivan, the film has a rock star cast: Laura Linney, Dame Maggie Smith, Kathy Bates, Agnes O’Casey, Stephen Rea and Mark O’Halloran. Though only Rea, O’Casey and O’Halloran are Irish, Smith and Bates, both Oscars winners, are no slouches in the accent department. Like so many Irish pictures that don’t focus on The Troubles, this one revolves around the sexual repression and judgmental circles born of The Catholic Church, though as a dramedy, the stand-in is a actually a kind Father Dermot (O’Halloran).
It’s 1967 and the church members in the village of Ballygar are preparing for a talent show with first prize coveted tickets to Lourdes. The ladies in particular want to go because they have plenty of troubles all the same: Eileen (Bates) might have cancer, Lily (Smith) has difficulty walking and most of all, Dolly (O’Casey) is urgently looking for a cure for her young son who has yet to speak. Lily has also been nursing a 40-year grief for her drowned son, who was once the boyfriend and cause of Chrissie’s (Linney) banishment after she became pregnant. Eileen and Chrissie, cousins, had a cherished friendship when they were younger, until Eileen and her mother sent her away in shame to the US. Lily, Eileen and Dolly form a girl group trio, The Miracles, to sing at the show, while the death of Chrissie’s mother brings her back to Ireland for the first time since she was a teen. They all end up going to Lourdes, including Chrissie, and each finds moments of grace, compassion and some healing.
If you like your Irish movies with some dramatic heft to them, the tale will likely feel on the thin side. But if it’s a lighter touch you seek, albeit a fairly predictable one, you’ll appreciate the comedic moments and the film’s ideas about empathy and forgiveness, to say nothing of the stellar starring trio.
In theatres now.
Also in theatres is The Lesson (which I saw post-fest), another Tribeca World Premiere. Directed by Alice Troughton and written by Alex MacKeith, the UK export is a fun, twisty literary thriller in the subgenre I’ll call “Who’s Messing With Who?”, in which the characters are either narcissists, manipulators, academic and societal strivers or all of the above.
Richard E. Grant, is J.M. Sinclair, a cutting, massively successful author in England and paterfamilias. He belittles his teenage son Bertie (Stephen McMillan), coolly regards his artist wife Hélène (Julie Delpy) whom he blames for the death of their other son two years earlier, and jousts with Liam (Irish native Daryl McCormack), a smart, working class tutor selected by Hélène to help Bertie get into Oxford. Hélène, a sharp-edged blonde who has little affection for her husband, accepts her role as supportive spouse on hand to ensure her husband’s unvarnished, lasting legacy. Liam is a fan (Sinclair is the subject of his thesis) and also an aspiring novelist, charmed by and fixated on Sinclair, spying him working late at night, and later watching the couple from his window as they get intimate, drawing creative inspiration from his furtive peeping. Grant is great fun to watch, Delpy is coiled, icy perfection and McCormack, back at Tribeca after last year’s breakout turn in Good Luck To You, Leo Grande, gives as good as he gets in the one upmanship. Call it Sex, Lies and Secrets.
And very honourable mentions go to a couple of terrific documentaries that don’t have Irish/UK ties, but are definitely worth seeing. If you think you know the whole story about late 80s pop duo Milli Vanilli – the late Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan – and their fall from grace (still the only musicians who ever had to return a Grammy after winning for Best New Artist), you most assuredly do not. Milli Vanilli’s meteoric rise up the charts – their six-times-platinum debut album in the U.S., Girl You Know It’s True – and cataclysmic implosion was far more than just fodder for talk show punch lines, as chronicled by director Luke Korem. Milli Vanilli is a compelling, tragic and heartfelt tribute to two very naive performers of colour who were completely exploited by a music industry that was completely complicit in the subterfuge and suffered zero consequences.
Available on Paramount+ this Fall.
Fittingly, Kim’s Video had its NY premiere at Tribeca. Directors David Redmond and Ashley Sabin have crafted a funny, wild and thoroughly enjoyable tale of the history of the beloved New York City video store chain of the 80s, 90s and early 2000s and the absolutely improbable, bonkers saga of what happened to the collection after the self-made entrepreneur Yongman Kim (a true character himself!) donated his collection of 55,000 movies not to NYU or a film archive but to a little city in Sicily, Italy. It’s an odyssey that takes Redmon and Sabin across the world, and on unexpected and wondrous detours.
For more about the fest and updated information on distribution and releases, go to tribecafilm.com
