Tribeca's "Other" Film Festival

Tribeca’s ‘Other’ Film Festival

This is an excerpt from my review, with Irina Ivanova, of VisionFest 2007. You can read the full review at The Indypendent.

- Frank

VisionFest 2007
Tribeca Cinemas

VisionFest, founded in 2001 as The Guerrilla Film and Video Festival, aims to elevate domestic filmmaking to the status of foreign films. Dubbed “the other festival,” the Tribeca-based annual event occasionally unearths films that go on to success at Sundance and elsewhere.

Participating films are mostly unrestricted in length and subject matter, and everything from three-minute horror shorts to full-length features are shown side-by-side, loosely organized by theme and genre. This year’s VisionFest, which ran from Sept. 19-23 at Tribeca Cinemas, was a mixed bag with a few gems.

Several films caught our eye. Patrick Smith’s Puppet is a humorous and existential treat in traditional hand-drawn animation.

Roland Becerra’s Dear Beautiful, a 30-minute animated horror feature, blends rich textures and a single-narrative voice to portray an apocalyptic story set behind a Connecticut couple’s deteriorating relationship. In the House of the Sin Eater, by Paul Kloss and Mathew Acheson, animates puppets and found objects to create a lush blend of anthropology and fairy-tale.

© Irina Ivanova & Frank Reynoso Oct. 2007, All Rights Reserved