This article appeared in the June 20, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Natchez (Suzannah Herbert, 2025)

Even with “Film” no longer in its title, the Tribeca Festival is Sundance with an NYC twist. From the beginning, Tribeca, devised to bring the downtown neighborhood back to life after 9/11, was Robert De Niro’s baby just as Sundance was Robert Redford’s. Both are major movie stars in an age when such luminaries can no longer bring audiences into theaters, and both also identify as independent actors and directors who’ve found ways to retain their autonomy from the Hollywood studios. Their respective festivals function as workshops for independent media-makers and platforms for early-career artists. A statement on the Tribeca Festival website reads: “The core of the festival program is our main slate of feature and short films, highlighting politically, culturally, and socially relevant films from diverse storytellers.” That filmmakers should ground their work in circumstances larger than what is immediately perceivable on the screen is a big ask, and yet, to varying degrees, it was true of every film I saw. The absence of slender rom-coms was striking, as was the abundance of social-issue documentaries, some of which also made you want to dance and sing.

A tough and complex depiction of intractable racism, Suzannah Herbert’s Natchez won the Best Documentary Feature award. Described as “a little blue speck in a sea of red,” Natchez is a small Mississippi city that was once one of the cotton capitals of the South. Its wealth derives from the labor of slaves, and, after the Civil War, from legally free men and women who slaved in the same fields for pennies. When the Great Depression of the 1930s and the arrival of the invasive boll weevil destroyed the cotton industry, women who lived in the antebellum mansions built during the plantation era decided to use those houses as capital, and rescued their town’s economy by catering to a nostalgia for the Old South—suffocating a gruesome history with displays of hoopskirts and dining forks.

Thus was formed the Natchez Garden Club, a society dedicated to “historical preservation” that hosts an annual “Pilgrimage” every spring, during which tourists—most of them middle-aged Southerners—pour into the town and ladies dressed like Scarlett O’Hara welcome them into their absurdly overdecorated homes and feed them their version of history. Thanks to the discerning eyes of Herbert and cinematographer Noah Collier, we see hypocrisy leak from the faces of their subjects, exactly as it does from the faces of the actors in Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017). But Natchez is not a horror film. Rather, it depicts the contest between two versions of history, the stakes of which are the American present and its possible future. Natchez, which elected one of the country’s first Black mayors in 1870 and an openly gay mayor in 2016, has placed some guardrails around the Garden Club, mainly in the form of a Black Baptist minister, Tracy “Rev” Collins, who offers a bus tour through reminders of the region’s haunted past, such as a National Historical Park site that once hosted the second-largest domestic slave market in the Deep South. Collins’s story of American racism, from slavery to Reconstruction to Jim Crow to Civil Rights, is dynamic and succinct—just plain brilliant. It falls largely on deaf ears, with the notable exception of a seemingly scatterbrained young woman in attendance, who thanks the “Rev” and has a conversion that, however tentative, leaves us with the hope that, in the words of Sam Cooke, “a change is gonna come.”

Two other smart and emotionally powerful documentaries that I saw at Tribeca have great storytellers at their center. In Daniel Junge and Sam Pollard’s I Was Born This Way, Archbishop Carl Bean, the late singer and activist who founded the Unity Fellowship Church (UFC) for LGBTQ+ people of color, narrates his life story—sometimes over archival footage and amazingly expressive rotoscoped images, and sometimes directly to the camera while seated in the oversize easy chair where he spent most of the last four years of his extraordinary life before passing away in 2021. Bean, who understood from childhood that he was gay, survived familial abuse to find his first real home in a Harlem gospel choir. In 1977, Motown released his biggest hit single, which gives the film its title, and which would become a gay disco anthem. By then, he had rejected the homophobia of the Black church and turned from gospel to “mission music.” He was living in Los Angeles when the AIDS crisis hit. Channeling his prodigious energy into activism, he organized the Minority AIDS Project, and upon discovering that if he became a minister, he would have more access to the Black gay men dying alone in city hospitals, he founded the UFC. By the time of his death, UFC had congregations in 12 cities.

I Was Born This Way is the kind of film that Tribeca knows how to turn into an event, with live music at the premiere and UFC members in the audience at every screening. But Tribeca also puts its imprimatur on some remarkable films that otherwise might never be seen. Augusto Zegarra won the Albert Maysles Award for Best New Documentary Director for Runa Simi, which follows a voice actor and radio host living in a small city in Peru as he tries to get the rights to dub The Lion King into Quechua—the family of Indigenous languages spoken by as many as 10 million people in Peru and other Latin American countries (and formerly dominant in the region before it was overtaken by Spanish as a result of colonialism). “It’s the language that expresses our emotions,” he explains, and we understand when we watch children at an outdoor screening hearing their own language from the mouths of beloved characters. Runa Simi brings together self-expression and place, and a person who faces down Disney and, when it ignores him, does exactly what the people he loves need him to do.

Standouts among the fiction films, Egyptian director Sarah Goher’s Happy Birthday (winner of prizes for Best International Narrative Feature and Best Screenplay in that division) and Nayra Ilic García’s Cuerpo Celeste are both coming-of-age films in which young women find their places in cruel, class-bound societies. Cuerpo Celeste is a memory piece about Chile in 1990, during the fall of the Pinochet regime. The 15-year-old girl at its center is puzzled by the bones discovered at the beach near her family’s summer home and by why her older relatives don’t want her to spend time with a boy she grew up with. In Happy Birthday, an 8-year-old girl works as a servant for a fractured, upper-middle-class Cairo family that’s short on money. The superbly structured screenplay by Mohamed Diab and Goher—and a complicated, heartbreaking lead performance by a very young actor, Doha Ramadan—allows us to see what the girl initially fails to acknowledge: how the family, including its own 8-year-old daughter, takes advantage of her energy and ingenuity while treating her as an inferior being—all while skirting the illegality of child labor. It is not until she is banished from the birthday party she made possible that she understands her “difference.” What she makes of that knowledge might inspire films to come. Goher is a filmmaker with a future.

Amy Taubin lives in New York City, where she writes about movies and art.