The Best Documentaries to Watch at this Year’s Tribeca Film Festival

The Best Documentaries to Watch at this Year’s Tribeca Film Festival


The Tribeca Film Festival came under fire last month after announcing that it would host the world premiere of the anti-vaccination documentary Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe. The festival later pulled the doc and cofounder Robert De Niro took direct responsibility for the selection, explaining that he wanted the screening to serve as an “opportunity for conversation around the issue.”
the unintended media storm, without fail, Tribeca documentaries deliver their fair share of conversation. This year, more than 80 films of various and exciting subjects will premiere in theaters around the city. Below, we share our list of seven documentaries worth seeing at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.



The Banksy Job
This art heist documentary follows around one of Banksy’s rivals, AK47, a former porn star turned “art terrorist” who ends up stealing a famous Banksy statue from the streets of London. Unlike the 2010 hit Exit Through the Gift Shop, the enigmatic graffiti artist isn’t backing this new documentary—although he does make an appearance on camera, so you never really know whether or not he’s actually the man behind this curtain, too.



All This Panic
Filmmaker Jenny Gage and her husband and director of photography, Tom Betterton, filmed two teenage sisters for three years as they navigated life in Brooklyn. The fly-on-the-wall-style documentary dives deep into the girls’ relationships, high school, and home life, and provides viewers with a realistic, nonjudgmental portrait of what it’s like to be a girl in today’s world.


Life, Animated
Based on the memoir by Ron Suskind, Life, Animated tells the story of the author’s son Owen, a young autistic boy who hadn’t spoken for years until one day when he finally learns to communicate with his family with the help of Disney movies. The heartwarming documentary was a hit when it premiered at Sundance earlier this year and will certainly appeal to audiences who, like Owen, also grew up reciting every single line of The Little Mermaid and Aladdin.


Do Not Resist
For his directorial debut, Craig Atkinson traveled around the country to explore the absurd militarization of our police force and how arming our cops with army-level weapons could have disastrous consequences for our freedom.

The First Monday in May
The annual Met Gala has been called the “Oscars of fashion” or, as André Leon Talley affectionately says, “the Super Bowl of fashion events.” The new film, directed by Andrew Rossi (Page One: Inside the New York Times), follows Vogue’s Editor in Chief, Anna Wintour, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute curator Andrew Bolton as they plan out the 2015 Met exhibition and gala, “China: Through the Looking Glass.” Aside from finding out what goes into throwing the biggest party of the year, viewers also get a glimpse inside the ultra-exclusive party.

Maurizio Cattelan: Be Right Back
Before Banksy, Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan was the one pulling all the pranks in the art world. Maura Axelrod’s documentary looks back on the polarizing artist’s career, beginning with his first solo show in Milan, where he simply hung a sign in front of a locked gallery door that read “Be Right Back,” all the way up to his 2011 Guggenheim retrospective, in which his most famous works weren’t displayed on the walls of the spiraled museum but instead hung from the ceiling.


the bomb
For its closing weekend, the Tribeca Film Festival will be going out with a bang with the premiere of a new multimedia installation called the bomb. Created by Smriti Keshari and Eric Schlosser, this experiential documentary about the world’s continued proliferation of nuclear weapons will be projected onto eight floor-to-ceiling screens at Gotham Hall, while the rock band The Acid performs in the center of the room. The goal is to have the audience feel like they’re in the center of a nuclear testing or attack. Needless to say, this screening isn’t for the faint of heart.

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