FORM-Idea

This spring the legendary Tribeca Film Festival returned with its usual lovely mix of features, dazzling shorts and ground-breaking documentaries.  Below is a list of my personal favourites.

The Stanford Prison Experiment: Unlocking the Truth directed by Juliette Eisner is a re-examination of the notorious Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971.  An experiment intended as a two-week behavioural study conducted under the auspices of Stanford university professor Philip Zimbardo.  The experiment simulated a prison environment where students would be separated into two groups, that of guards and inmates and their behaviour was monitored.

What appeared to happen at the onset of the experiment was that those picked to be guards almost instantly became so abusive to their fellow students, that the experiment was stopped after just six days with one participate, playing an inmate, apparently experiencing a nervous breakdown.  The findings of Zimbardo, which were later published, continued to be widely referenced by others throughout the years to explain abuses of power in subsequent real-life situations. Most notoriously the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were prison wardens infamously physically and psychologically abused inmates there. This new documentary though shades new light on this study and points to what many now consider to be its unscientific approach and ultimately fraudulent findings.

For the documentary, Eisner united past participates of the earlier experiment, along with contemporary behavioural scientists, as well as Philip Zimbardo himself.  The film re-examines Philip Zimbardo’s methodology and highlights the fact that according to Zimbardo’s own records the guards appeared to have been coached to behave in a particular way. So, their abuse of “inmates” was not the direct result of their environment but rather a response to coaching.  Coaching the film suggest which would help the experiment arrive at a conclusion Zimbardo had already arrived at before it had even started and he simply used the experiment to support his theory which was that those with power over others will invariably abuse that power.

The documentary seems to suggest that even the prisoner who was, reported at the time to have had a nervous breakdown on the evidence of his interview here, suggest he simply wanted to leave the experiment and return home.  One the most interesting aspects of this film is the interview with a British scientist who led a similar experiment conducted in the UK in the late 90’s.  This one in a completely controlled environment with twenty-four-hour monitoring of all participates.  In this case their results were wildly different from Zimbardo’s, they found that guards not only did not become increasingly abusive but in fact if anything they expressed empathy with the prisoners they were meant to guard.   His conclusion was that what happens in these situations will always depend solely on who is in charge.  Much like a real-life Lord of the Flies situation where a real group of school boys from Togo who were marooned on a remote island for over a year.   Not only did they not descend into anarchy described in the book but instead cooperated, created an orderly society and survived without losing a single child over the course of an entire year.  A complete rebuke to the author, William Golding’s dark theory about humanity.  Maybe on the evidence of this humanity is not in as desperate shape as many would have us believe.

Luther: Never Too Much this beautiful documentary looks at the life of music legend Luther Vandross, an astonishingly talented singer, arranger, songwriter and producer who worked with everyone from David Bowie to Aretha Franklin.   From Roberta Flack, who according to him fired him as her back up singer so he would pursue his own solo career, to Bette Midler.   This lovely documentary charts both his musical contributions to so many careers as well as well as his own constant struggles with his weight and in general how the world viewed him.  This internal struggle would haunt him his entire life and in his eyes over shadow all his remarkable accomplishments.

Soldiers of Song is another documentary gem from the festival and in it the director, Ryan Smith, documents how musicians from around Ukraine try as much as possible to use music as a form of resistance.  The people the film follows range from a rock musician who doubles as a drone operator, to a folk musician who repeatedly stresses the importance of art during this national crisis.  To an opera singer so seriously wounded that it was thought he would never sing again only for the singer, after surgery to recover and perform a concert later, to a classical conductor captured by Russians soldiers and given a choice of conducting a concert for the Russians or being killed.  Well aware of the fate of Yuriy Kerpatenko, a Ukrainian conductor who in similar situation refused and was killed after, he refused but to his astonishment after paying money he was allowed to escape and is now conducting in Kyiv.  This documentary is a testament to the resilience of the Ukrainian people as well as a testament to the power of art during dark times.

Alien Weaponry: Kua Tupu Te Ara has to be one of my personal favourites documentaries not just from the festival but of the entire year so far.  The film charts a few years in the career of Alien Weaponry a Maori metal band made up of brothers Henry and Lewis who started the band as teenagers with a mission to rock the world while celebrating Maori culture.  This charming behind the scenes looks at this young trio (which includes Tūranga Morgan-Edmonds since 2020) is dazzling and you feel you are watching a band on the cusp of greatness.

Griffin in Summer is also the epitome of charm as we watch another teenage coming of age story but this one looks at its fourteen-year-old protagonist, precocious playwright Griffin Naffly who is obsessed with having his plays one day produced in New York.  He writes quite hilariously about the big issues of the world and lives for his theatre dreams, that is until he meets his mom’s handyman and after that he works to find a way to combine both of his two obsessions.  If you can imagine watching a baby Hemingway, with a sense of humour, trying to find his way in both love and theatre    then you have some idea of how adorable Griffin in Summer is. Definitely one to watch for.

In the Summers is a semi-autobiographical story, which is loosely based on, writer and director Alessandra Lacorazza’s own trips to see her father in Columbia during her childhood summers. In the film, it’s a pair of sisters who make the yearly trip from California to New Mexico and we watch their growing estrangement from their loving but volatile father.  We watch as they grow from being open hearted teenagers to guarded distant young adults and the film clearly implies that as their relationship with their father shrivels this in turn will taint all their future relationships.  Tribeca as always was a welcome reminder of the beauty of films.