Great news for those of us who can’t attend the Tribeca Film Festival. The festivals “Streaming Room” will offer selected screenings online and via video-on-demand. Slated this year are 6 features and 18 short films — half premiere events, and half representing highlights from past festivals. Each selection will be available during three to five online screening windows, and you can reserve your virtual “seat” at tribecaonline.com.
The features all have socially relevant themes. Jerry Rothwell’s “Donor Unknown” is a documentary that follows the search of JoEllen Marsh, a grown-up test-tube baby who tracks down dozens of “siblings” from the same sperm donor. David Dusa’s “Flowers of Evil” (in French and Persian with subtitles) is the love story of an Algerian-French hotel bellman and an Iranian student forced into exile after the 2009 elections.
Julio Jorquera’s “My Last Round” tells the love story of a gay Chilean boxer and his partner, a kitchen worker, who move from their small rural town to Santiago. The impoverished protagonist of the Paco Cabezas crime film “Neon Flesh” opens a brothel as a tribute to his mother, a prostitute. In Scott Rettberg’s documentary “New York Says Thank You,” New Yorkers whose lives were touched by Sept. 11 travel the country helping communities rebuild after disasters. “Rabies” is said to be Israel’s first horror film.
Among the video-on-demand options worth checking out from Tribeca Film, the festival’s movie releasing arm, are Peter Mullan’s “Neds,” a kitchen-sink drama set in 1970s Glasgow about a bright young man contaminated by his punishing social environment, and Massy Tadjedin’s feature debut, “Last Night,” a hard look at the sexual temptations facing an attractive married couple (Keira Knightley and Sam Worthington) living the Manhattan high life. (NYTimes)
More information and schedule details at tribecaonline.com
