Now Streaming & Screening: Hidden Gems From Tribeca Film Festival

This June, Tribeca Film Festival celebrated its 23rd year showcasing over 100 films (picked from 13,016 submissions) from 48 countries. The event opened with the world premiere of Diane von Furstenberg: Woman In Charge, directed by Tribeca alumni Trish Dalton and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, part of the 50 percent of the films in competition directed by women.

What Are Some Of Honeysuckle's Favorite Hidden Gems From The 2024 Tribeca Film Festival?

While several of the films from the 2024 festival are yet to see a wider release, a couple of our favorites are now available to stream. And though one of our top picks is a bit harder to find, we couldn't help but salute a truly unique documentary. Here are three "hidden gems" from Tribeca we're still grooving on - and that you should check out while you can.

1-800-ON-HER-OWN

Director

Dana Flor

Watch the trailer for 1-800-ON-HER-OWN:

What Makes 1-800-ON-HER-OWN A Hidden Gem?

I kicked off my fest with the documentary 1-800-ON-HER-OWN, an unvarnished profile of singer, actor, writer and activist Ani DiFranco, directed by Dana Flor. The first scene, setting the tone, is of DiFranco backstage before a concert declaring, “I’m going to fuck things up, I just know it,” and then opens her mouth and screams.

*Ani DiFranco in the documentary 1-800-ON-HER-OWN (C) Flor Films, courtesy of Tribeca Film Festival*

Of course, she’s not a folk singer who just played coffee houses and small clubs. DiFranco is an unlikely music pioneer, starting her Buffalo-based label Righteous Babe Records as a teenager in 1990 when she was still too young to drink legally at the venues she played at. The name of the documentary is the phone number for the record company, which Kurt Loder read on air during an MTV spot and RBR was deluged with calls, which DiFranco’s little crew of people answered because that’s all there was for staff. Unlike many artists, especially the female ones to come out of the 90s who are no longer releasing music, she had a great deal of independence since she was solely responsible for the vocals, instrumentals, recordings and for some albums, even the artwork and design.

She grew her audience from her first cassette tape, a grassroots approach through which she sold the copies of the tape from her car before getting it into local stores and taking off from there. She also crossed over into mainstream success pretty early when her cover of “Wishin’ and Hopin'” was used in the Julia Roberts film My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997) and getting booked on shows like The Late Show With David Letterman. DiFranco talked candidly about how that breaking out created its own problems, chief among them when her longtime business partner and on/off boyfriend Scot Fisher invested the company’s money into the restoration of a historic Buffalo church 25 years ago and transformed it into a performance space that’s the current HQ for the record label as well. There’s also the grind of touring, which she does for the love of music, of course (her 21^st studio album, Unprecedented Sh!t, was released in May of this year), but more significantly, because her funds are tied up in the church. DiFranco, a long way from being an emancipated minor, isn’t strictly on her own anymore with a husband and two kids, a landscape she’s navigating as a 50-something woman while her family remains home in New Orleans.

DiFranco is, not surprisingly, a great subject for a documentary, and in Flor’s hands, 1-800-ON-HER-OWN is a rich portrait of the 90s music scene and what it means to be a female musician in the 21^st Century when your name isn’t Taylor or Beyonce.

After the screening, DiFranco performed four songs, which was quite a thrill for the audience. And for DiFranco, who, she informed the rapt crowd, “didn’t tape my fingers,” it was “the most songs I’ve sung in 2024.” It was a quite spectacular and memorable beginning to my Tribeca Fest.

Where Can I Watch 1-800-ON-HER-OWN?

Though 1-800-ON-HER-OWN is not yet available to stream, there will be a screening of the documentary at the Sidewalk Film Festival on August 24, 2024. Click here for details.

For more on the documentary, visit anidifranco.film.

Daddio

Director

Christy Hall

Watch the trailer for DADDIO:

What Makes Daddio A Hidden Gem?

While Tribeca screens incredibly compelling documentaries, there are dozens of outstanding narrative films that are must-sees. After more than a decade in the business, I’d only caught Dakota Johnson’s work in one movie, where she was part of an ensemble. But I was intrigued by the actors in and the conceit of Daddio, written and directed by Christy Hall. Co-starring Sean Penn, the two-hander takes place over the course of one night in the New York cab Clark (Penn) is driving from JFK after picking up Girlie (Johnson).

Well manicured and dressed in black, she gets in and immediately touches up her lipstick. She looks troubled by something or someone on her phone, which she sets down. The sharp-eyed, Clark, noting the rarity of this, starts up a conversation, complimenting her with, “It’s nice you’re not on your phone. It says a lot about you,” to which she replies, “I like to think so.” Clark, weathered and wise after decades behind the wheel, susses out pretty quickly that she’s avoiding a guy. Girlie doesn’t want to say his name, and Clark, undeterred, turns around, moves back the plastic divider between them and remarks, “You’re afraid to say his name ‘cause the guy’s married. Or you're married, or someone’s married.” She answers, “He’s married,“ and without missing a beat, Clark responds, “I know he’s married!”

Alternating between flirting, curiosity, pathos and protectiveness, Clark can sense this is someone to have more than just idle chit chat with, and Girlie feels the same. Matching his directness, she gets him to “ante up” about his own affairs of the heart. He shares the story of his first wife – they met when she threw up in his cab – and the crazy chemistry they had before he destroyed the marriage with other women. Insightful about his actions now but laced with regret and bruised for good, he’s done with relationships.

“You got a good heart, I can see that,” he says, blunt but not unkind, “which is why I just gotta tell you, you’re better off walking away.”

You don’t really know in which direction Daddio is going, and that’s to Hall’s credit. In her feature debut, she has written a beautifully evocative movie that relies almost entirely on just the expressions of the actors, whom she deftly frames in the many close ups in the car. Johnson and Penn offer a master class in subtlety, Girlie and Clark’s vulnerabilities and wounds accessible, but also their unlikely openness with each other. Penn delivers a revelatory, magnetic performance, who even when he was in a rare sort of romance like She’s So Lovely (1997), was never as gentle or light as he is here. The lovely, profound, connection formed by two strangers will linger long after.

Where Can I Watch Daddio?

Daddio is in limited theatrical release now and also available on AppleTV+ and Amazon Prime Video.

*The cast of ST. ELMO'S FIRE (1985), which starred the core members of The Brat Pack (C) Silver Screen Collection / Getty Images, courtesy of Tribeca Film Festival*

Brats

Director

Andrew McCarthy

Watch the trailer for BRATS:

What Makes Brats A Hidden Gem?

When writer David Blum coined the snarky phrase ‘The Brat Pack” in a 1985 New York Magazine article about some of the biggest names in Hollywood, it’s highly doubtful he expected those words would have the currency they did and still do. For actor, writer and director Andrew McCarthy (a member of said Pack), they did, in a massively negative way, responsible for him losing “control of the narrative of my career overnight.” He found himself 35 years later reflecting on the damage done and needing to exorcise some of the anger he was still carrying. In McCarthy’s documentary Brats, he sets out to explore how that dismissive play on The Rat Pack sidelined him, what peace he has or hasn’t made with it, and to discover how it affected the others. He also gets some thoughtful, cultural commentary along the way about the lasting legacy of this 80s pop culture time capsule from Bret Easton Ellis, author of Less Than Zero, itself a withering critique of the decade (the movie version starred McCarthy and Brat Pack-adjacent actors Robert Downey, Jr. and James Spader), and writer Malcolm Gladwell, a Gen X-er himself, among others.

The 80s were an incredibly fertile time for movies about teenagers, starring teenagers and 20-somethings (that they were very white, sometimes sexist, sometimes homophobic was true, and somebody should make a documentary about that). Director John Hughes (Sixteen Candles; The Breakfast Club; Pretty In Pink), who was the unofficial ringmaster of this Hollywood youth movement - and Molly Ringwald its queen - played a big role in launching the careers of a number of the core group, though it was Joel Schumacher’s slightly more adult St. Elmo’s Fire, that fittingly lit the fuse, scattering Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, McCarthy, Demi Moore, Judd Nelson and Ally Sheedy, some into near-obscurity, isolation (Sheedy, Nelson) or different paths (Estevez) and others, down the line, onto the A List (Lowe and Moore). Mare Winningham, who was also in the movie, escaped unscathed, and isn’t interviewed, and neither Ringwald nor Nelson appear in Brats.

Though I think many people would be curious to hear from Ringwald, the movie doesn’t suffer in her absence thanks to the many entertaining and revealing interviews McCarthy conducts, talking with his former co-stars for the first time in decades (and also to some who managed to not get tarnished, like Timothy Hutton, Lea Thompson, and Jon Cryer). Lowe and Moore are the most interesting case studies. Lowe, in particular, is like a Teflon-coated phoenix, having thrived despite the label and then the very public fall after the videotape of his sexual encounter with a minor in 1988 (when he had been at the Democratic Convention) came out.

Moore’s arc was even more extraordinary, first with a marriage to Bruce Willis and then with multiple hits that allowed her to become the highest paid actress in North America in the late 90s. Whether owing to making piles of money, therapy, leaving Hollywood, or just being a veteran of the industry, Moore comes off extraordinarily enlightened and healthy about the past. She realized that part of the reason they all were offended is because they were so young. Nonetheless, she tells McCarthy, “It stayed with me for a while. It was unjust, a real limited perspective.” She was able to move past it when she understood that “it wasn’t really about us but about the person who wrote it, trying to be clever and get his next job.”

McCarthy satisfies the trajectory of the documentary by sitting down with David Blum for a conversation that doesn’t neatly resolve things for him, but does make for a watchable, tense exchange between the two. He does, however, happily realize there’s affection and “so much goodwill” between the former exiles, a byproduct of the project, something that hadn’t existed when they were competitive, arrogant actors working together.

Some may find Brats to be silly and inconsequential. But clearly, despite the flaws of those 80s movies, which millions across generations from Baby Boomers to Gen Z have watched, their take on the agonies and occasional joys of adolescence, continue to resonate with viewers. If you’re in that camp, you’ll find Brats is a fun, nostalgic, captivating look into an era that no longer exists and likely never will again.