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Tribeca 2021: The COVID Fest

Jesse is a cofounder of SportsAlcohol.com even though he doesn't care for sports or alcohol. His favorite movie is Ron Howard's The Paper. I think. This is what happens when you don't write your own bio. I know for sure likes pie.
Jesse

There was no way we were getting out of Tribeca 2021 without COVID movies. No possibility. Tribeca tends to skew more indie and experimental than a lot of major fests—it’s not unusual for a majority of the narrative films I watch at Tribeca to clock in under 100 minutes, as was the case for Tribeca 2021, with plenty of titles well under 90—and this year they’re the first big U.S. festival back post-pandemic, at a time when filmmakers have had 15 months to cook up some potentially ill-advised COVID projects. Though it doesn’t advertise itself as such, the festival’s midpoint-but-actually-penultimate-night “centerpiece” selection, Steven Soderbergh’s No Sudden Move, was one such pandemic project, shot in a “bubble” last fall. (HBO Max apparently loves an auteur in the bubble; they premiered Doug Liman’s Soderberghian Locked Down in January.) Soderbergh’s movie isn’t ill-advised at all, at least in terms of how it turned out; mostly, it’s a blast. But there are COVID-heavier projects on the Tribeca bill, too, that take up an assignment seemingly no audience members have given out: How do we make a movie within and about the global pandemic we’ve all been experiencing in some form or another for over a year?
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