Afrikaans
Akan
Albanian
Amharic
Arabic
Armenian
Azerbaijani
Basque
Belarusian
Bemba
Bengali
Bihari
Bosnian
Breton
Bulgarian
Cambodian
Catalan
Cebuano
Cherokee
Chichewa
Chinese (Simplified)
Chinese (Traditional)
Corsican
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
Esperanto
Estonian
Ewe
Faroese
Filipino
Finnish
French
Frisian
Ga
Galician
Georgian
German
Greek
Guarani
Gujarati
Haitian Creole
Hausa
Hawaiian
Hebrew
Hindi
Hmong
Hungarian
Icelandic
Igbo
Indonesian
Interlingua
Irish
Italian
Javanese
Kannada
Kazakh
Kinyarwanda
Kirundi
Kongo
Krio (Sierra Leone)
Kurdish
Kurdish (Soranรฎ)
Kyrgyz
Laothian
Latin
Latvian
Lingala
Lithuanian
Lozi
Luganda
Luo
Luxembourgish
Macedonian
Malagasy
Malay
Malayalam
Maltese
Maori
Marathi
Mauritian Creole
Moldavian
Mongolian
Myanmar (Burmese)
Montenegrin
Nepali
Nigerian Pidgin
Northern Sotho
Norwegian
Norwegian (Nynorsk)
Occitan
Oriya
Oromo
Pashto
Persian
Polish
Punjabi
Quechua
Romansh
Runyakitara
Russian
Samoan
Scots Gaelic
Serbian
Serbo-Croatian
Sesotho
Setswana
Seychellois Creole
Shona
Sindhi
Sinhalese
Slovak
Slovenian
Somali
Spanish (Latin American)
Sundanese
Swahili
Swedish
Tajik
Tamil
Tatar
Telugu
Thai
Tigrinya
Tonga
Tshiluba
Tumbuka
Turkish
Turkmen
Twi
Uighur
Ukrainian
Urdu
Uzbek
Vietnamese
Welsh
Wolof
Xhosa
Yiddish
Yoruba
Zulu
Nice sunny day and the only chance of a shower for the rest of the work week
might be late Thursday or Thursday night.
Get ready for the second coming of Air Jordan. It's primary day and the polls
are open in New York City.
Voters are deciding among about 250 candidates.
Giants lose their opener in Monday Night Football in Denver.
Yankees and Red Sox wash down in the Bronx. How many sugar?
Good morning. 64 degrees Tuesday, September 11.
It's 8.52 here in New York. We understand that there has been a plane
crash on the southern tip of Manhattan. You're looking at the World Trade
Center.
i was just about to go away out of out of town for the uh that day and i my
flight was cancelled i went back downtown and um
and already checkpoints have been set up in canal street and so on i went through
and got home and my i lived about nine blocks north of the uh
world trade center i had my television big Big
screen television to my left and I had the big picture window And
when I saw the South Tower start to go down I had to
look at the television to confirm what I was seeing out my window with my own
eyes It was unreal. It was surreal
And then ran like hell, thank God.
I'm 69, but I can still run.
You didn't know what the future would be.
It was so bad that you couldn't even comprehend the enormity of it.
Well, that's not the right word. I guess it was just, you know.
Tribeca was one of those neighborhoods that was sealed off.
Which meant no one was coming back anytime soon.
If ever.
Businesses closed.
The streets emptied.
People scattered.
The air was toxic.
And it would take years to understand what it was doing to people.
It wasn't just the grief for the nearly 3,000 who died that day.
It was a rupture in the geography of the city.
People were afraid to come downtown.
Bob and I wanted to help we knew we had to do something
It's crazy thinking it was 25 years ago.
The towers were in our neighborhood.
So at that moment, we were human beings with hearts broken and our
community torn apart.
And a huge hole in the ground left by terrorists. What the hell could we do to
fight back?
And what the hell could we do to say, we're still here, screw you, and we're
going to show you stories, and we're going to do something, and we are loud
and proud.
We just did it. And I think more of us have to
do.
In 1989, Jane and I started the Tribeca Film Center.
If you looked left out of my office window, you could see the towers.
They were always there.
Which means after a while, you just stopped noticing them.
And then, one day, they were gone.
People needed to come together, and that's what art does.
It unites us.
It pushes back against the things that try to tear us apart.
When freedom is under such attack, storytellers need to
gather in response.
It's creating an environment where people feel safe to tell their story,
whatever their story is.
I fell in love with New York through the movies, and now New York needed the
movies to recover.
The fuck are you smiling about?
To me, New York is the most cinematic city in the world.
It can be romantic, gritty, lonely, desperate,
or ready to explode.
The city's famous for the big stuff.
The skyline, the bridges, the landmarks everybody recognizes.
But I always thought the places that got the least attention were the most
interesting. Hey!
I'm walking here!
Well, look, George.
You hear that, New York? We don't quit!
Now, how do you like that?
Two and a half miles is as wide as this cacophony gets.
You see the world through someone else's eyes.
You start to understand how other people see things.
I'm as mad as hell! I'm not gonna take this anymore!
And somewhere in there, your perspective shifts.
I personally figured I was watching something that somebody else would never
see again in the world. Thought it was once in a lifetime.
And no matter what the city does to us, we always come back to it.
I love this town!
The site selected for the Trade Center was an old section of Manhattan's Lower
West Side.
The area housed a great number of small businesses, but the predominance of
electronic stores caused it to be known as Radio Row.
In 1966, demolition began.
In all, 164 buildings had to be torn down, and generations of power,
telephone, gas, steam, and water lines had to be rerouted.
More than 250,000 people live here in the neighborhoods that surround the site
where the Twin Towers once stood.
This area is a ghost town, totally closed to the public. There isn't even
electricity in many of these buildings right now.
I wish things were normal just so we didn't have to think about it. I wish we
could just go to a movie theater and watch movies, but none are open. I wish,
you know, it's hard.
It was devastation downtown.
in terms of the restaurants and the businesses.
We had a lot of friends that worked as waiters and people that ran clubs.
I mean, it was just terrible down there. It was dying.
We started organizing these events called Dinner Downtown.
I had this idea of inviting people to come to these dinners.
My goal was have a meal, save a job.
They kept growing in size.
You got assigned with like four other celebrities to go to a restaurant and
you're going to have dinner in one restaurant and then go to another place
to have dessert.
There was like 30 teams or some crazy thing.
It puts smiles on people's faces.
You can't underestimate the power of that.
Not only to rejuvenate the neighborhood, but to lift people's spirits in a
genuine fucking way.
At one dinner downtown, there was this Con Ed worker who had lost his son
sitting next to me.
He said he felt like it was finally okay to leave the house to do something
besides mourn.
That was in November 2001.
Dozens of New York notables are trying to jumpstart the tourism industry with a
$40 million advertising campaign.
If it's not such a big deal, why don't you be the turkey? You want me to be the
turkey? Yeah, come on.
We were doing everything we could think of to get New York to feel like New York
again.
We thought, how do we give our community something to look forward to?
Could we give our neighbors a new memory?
Bob and I talked about doing a film festival, but this felt like the right
time.
Tribeca Film Festival is a unique opportunity for people to join together
in the downtown community to share their loves of cinema.
And if anybody could do this, it's Bob De Niro and Jane Rosenthal.
I thought it was a great idea.
They had a vision.
You don't go into battle without having a strategy or a plan, and they had that.
And I've seen a lot of things start and just crumble.
This did not.
This is the time to do it. It's very important for many reasons, many obvious
reasons. And so let's do it.
The festival was kind of an act of defiance.
We had 120 days,
1,300 volunteers, no money, no blueprint, just an idea and a
neighborhood that needed people back in it.
This wasn't just about movies. It was about whether downtown was coming back.
Some of the toughest things were figuring out what movie theaters we
could go into. We had to go in wearing hazmat suits.
We had to get the city on board, business leaders, politicians.
Mike Bloomberg showed up first just as a supporter, then as the mayor.
Nobody slept much.
You looked out the window, it was still smoking.
That kept things in perspective.
Our city had been attacked.
It felt like this is what you had to do.
There was this mantra that we had.
Whenever people would get upset about something or complain about something or
whatever it was, we'd say, look left.
That's why we're doing it.
We weren't sure how it would feel to go from a recovery operation in lower
Manhattan to suddenly screening movies.
We invited Nelson Mandela to open the first festival.
He really gave us a way forward.
Our goal was to celebrate the power of filmmaking, but more importantly, to
revitalize our neighborhood that was devastated on September 11th.
The mission of the film festival is simple, to bring 50,000 people to Lower
Manhattan over the next four days, to use the power of filmmaking not only to
entertain, but also to rebuild our city.
We invite everyone to come and join us.
This neighborhood in particular is, even before September, was just sort of being
born, and now it needs all this healing. So I think it's sort of a perfect thing
they've done.
You know, the great thing about the movie business is that it draws crowds.
So when you have a film festival, you know, you're going to have people down
in the neighborhood, and that's going to help all of the restaurants and all of
the smaller businesses.
I mean, live down here, I saw firsthand just how devastated the neighborhood
was. So when Jane and Bob called about the festival, it was a no-brainer to
jump in and do whatever they asked me to do. And that's what our community
needed, you know, to be in a room laughing and crying together.
That first year was important to have a comedy because you wanted to laugh.
If you laughed, your endorphins come out, and then you feel better.
You just go.
Okay. I'll be back.
Ooh, I'm really scared.
I've been to a lot of film festivals.
I love them and I believe in them. And I've seen it firsthand time and time
again, what a fabulous vitamin B12 injection to the buttock they can be to
any area, any city, any town.
Now there's, you know, obviously the neighborhood's really rejuvenated.
More people are walking up and down the streets than I've ever seen in months.
People seem to be, you know, having a good time, talking about movies,
thinking about the neighborhood, which is really the whole point of it.
The thing that Bob and Jane really did.
was to say to people, listen, yes, this happened.
We're not afraid.
Downtown will not just be revitalized, but it will be reinvigorated.
Part of the responsibility that Bob and Jane took on was saying quite
loudly, we are not going to take this lying down.
We're going to bring downtown back.
I lived downtown.
We had started work on a documentary about 9-11, and I wanted Bob, who was
sort of the unofficial mayor of Tribeca, to be the front person for it. It's hard
to weigh what happened on September 11th. But then he and Jane came up with
the idea of doing a film festival downtown, and I don't know anybody who
could say no to Bob De Niro.
Graydon Carter had the idea of doing a Vanity Fair party at the courthouse.
And that's kind of when the festival felt real, like, oh my God, we've really
done something. Look, it's real.
At the event, if anybody needed to know where the bathrooms were, they'd ask any
nearby billionaire, because the billionaires had all had trials in the
building and knew exactly where the men's rooms were.
The Tribeca Film Festival, that was the beginning of putting the city back
together.
Now it's part of the...
cultural schedule of the city the festival started as a reaction to 9 11
but it was also the birth of something very special what can we do to keep our
neighborhood alive and moving forward
we all had different
visions of cinema jane had a vision bob had a vision i had a vision
Marty Scorsese was involved at the beginning.
In fact, Marty began supplying films for retrospectives and the idea that a film
festival would be new films, but also classic films, silent films, be all
kinds of cinema.
This was part of what a film festival is supposed to be and what Tribeca became.
For me...
this Manhattan is the universe.
And so everything I see and everything I react to is filtered through my
experience in the city.
Bob, you know that when we were downtown, because we kind of knew each
other when I think we were 16.
Where did you hang out?
Two blocks south of where you were, right where we shot, actually, at 10
Manor Street, Mulberry Street, that area.
No matter what the immigrant group is, the immigrant experience, I think it's
generally the same pattern.
Who are we in this country?
You know, what are we?
It's a great experiment. Will it continue?
You know, can we make it continue?
You've seen the pictures of me and Fellini and Sergio Leone.
Oh, my God, that's great.
My parents at a certain point had to be moved from Elizabeth Street because they
couldn't go up and down the stairs anymore, so they got them an apartment
in an elevator building on 19th Street and 3rd
Avenue, remember?
The first time I visited the apartment, Sergio was with me. I said, this is a
grand occasion. I said, maybe the first time you're visiting the apartment.
And my mother made all this food for him.
She liked him, said he was a very good eater.
But at that time, this place, the only excellent restaurant, for example, and
place was the Odeon.
Everything else was dead empty.
There was nothing here except the Odeon.
I stayed here for quite a while.
You know, and as we did, it became more lively, places opened, people started to
move down here.
So the place started to come together.
I was here at the time of where it was just the very, very beginning of
the development of the place, put it that way.
You know, where people actually started to be encouraged to come here and also
to create it.
When I first moved here, and I would say, I was living in Tribeca, and people
would say to me, I thought you moved to New York. And I'd say, I have moved to
New York.
It's Tribeca.
It's the triangle below Canal Street.
If you look at a map of lower Manhattan in the early 1800s, this place was
mostly open fields, right at the edge of the city.
The closeness to the water, the accessibility of all the piers, the
wholesale food market, all those things drove Tribeca to become what it
was. And this area became this actually, you know, rather beautiful little
industrial village in the 70s. There was still a certain amount of industry,
but not enough to really keep it going.
As artists began to be priced out of Soho, they trickled down
below Canal Street and into this industrial area that was weirdly off the
radar. There were very few people.
I mean, it was bleak.
If you think of Marty's film, After Hours, it was like that.
But there was a lot of...
freedom and you know you can hang yourself with it or you can find it to
be liberating tribeca became a place where you could live and work in the
same room where young families moved into former factories like so much in
new york it wasn't designed that way it just worked
the space that i remember
particularly during the day was all trucking Trucks everywhere then at
night. It was dead empty.
It was really good for stealing hubcaps or Any kind of sex that you wanted
or like drugs that was you couldn't nobody could see anything Yeah, I'm done
before after-hours. So try Becca all of a sudden now is like the Elysian Fields.
I mean well I Said I know guys used to steal hubcaps take cars from here. What
is it?
Not that I did. I'm just saying.
In this corner of New York City between the Wall Street Traders and the Soho Art
Galleries, De Niro is building a film community, a place for ideas, talent,
and money can get together outside of Hollywood.
When I saw this building, I said it would be nice to have a place that would
have everything like a restaurant, a screening room, especially this one,
which is a state-of-the-art screening room.
Don't ask me all the details, but I know it is, where a lot of people would be
brought together in film, creative people who, just by being together,
ideas would come up and projects and so on that we don't even know what they
would be. I mean, the whole thing will take on a life of its own.
Gene and I started... Working together, I saw this building and I thought, well,
gee, it'd be great if we could do something.
It was my dream.
And we actually got it done.
I grew up in the village a few blocks north.
In the late 70s, I was looking around for gym space to train for Raging Bull.
That's when I kind of fell for the neighborhood.
The neighborhood was the Mercantile and Butter and Egg District.
This building was the former Martinson Coffee and Tetley Tea Building.
If you walked by this block, it really did smell of coffee roasting.
If you walked a little further south, you got to the Nut District.
The whole point was to build a place for independent film in New York.
People from LA always said, New York's a nice place to visit. Wouldn't want to
live there. Well, that was how it went for me.
LA's a nice place to visit. I wouldn't want to live there.
We wanted to be down here. It was more unique, special.
This building seemed perfect.
What we did is take a manufacturing building that was actually for physical
manufacturing and turn it into a place of...
creating and manufacturing stories and creativity.
The first festival was only four days.
And then we had to immediately start the second festival.
It is my pleasure to announce the second annual Tribeca Film Festival will
be returning to Lower Manhattan this spring.
And slowly it began to have this kind of celebrity aura to it.
It went from this emotional 9-11 experience to becoming a very valid
festival.
Tribeca helped give respect to documentaries.
It became part of the business.
Find out who made it. Find out what else they've done. Here's a name you never
heard of before.
Virunga is a story about a British oil company that was illegally exploring for
oil within a national park.
There was a lot of people that didn't want this film to see the light of day.
A year after the film... launched at Tribeca, Soko International, formerly
withdrew from the Virunga National Park.
And then people started talking about the film as an awards contender.
There's a contingent of filmmakers you know will show up at Tribeca. They're
the cream of the crop of film festival talent.
Taxi to the Dark Side, it had the premiere at Tribeca, went on to win the
Oscars.
I just thought that this would be a helpful time for us all to, like, now
that the first screenings are up, to actually look at it day by day.
Are we kind of front-loading things that we think are impactful?
Does every day have a good balance?
I think we've really become a discovery festival.
It's the part of the job that I think is the most exciting, is that we could
potentially be changing someone's life, changing culture.
putting fingerprints on what the film culture in this country looks like.
Voice of the Rainbow, Mouthful of Gold, The Long Haul, those are kind of the
ones I see on this list that could go into a 250 to 350 size.
An iconic class could fill one of those Sunday slots.
Hi, my name is Damien Chazelle. I'm the writer and director of Guy and Madeline
on a Park Bench, and this is my first Tribeca Film Festival.
One of my first years, we saw Damien Chazelle's first film, Guy and Madeline
on a Park Bench.
He's gone on to such incredible success since then.
It's sort of mind-boggling. There's a whole lot of filmmakers that have
started here.
Ryan Coogler had his first short here, which was called Locks.
We chose writer-director Nia DaCosta's Little Woods.
Nia DaCosta, she's a wonderful filmmaker that has since completely blown up.
Oh, wow.
Winning something like that on your first film is so...
impactful. It makes people pay attention.
That's one of the things I really love about Tribeca is that they genuinely are
focused in expanding the kinds of films that we get to see and from different
kinds of people.
My career was made there because that's where I sold my film, and that really
changed sort of my trajectory.
We just kept doing what we set out to do, finding new voices, new ways to tell
stories. different perspectives, people with something to say.
We'd like to present the Founders Award for Best Narrative Feature. The winner
will receive $25,000, as well as an Art Award valued at $50,000.
The Art Awards program is something that Jane conceived of in the very early days
because we are a competitive festival.
Every year, approximately 10 artists contribute original artwork from their
collection or something that they make for the festival, and it serves as a
filmmaker prize.
So it's really one art form celebrating another.
Viable piece of art, it's a nice thing to give to somebody.
It grows with them.
I never had a sense of community in my life.
To be a part of the Tribeca Film Festival and to be a part of what it did
for other people, I was very proud to be part of that.
How's it going? How you doing?
When I first started the festival,
Most of the films we showed were on like 35 or 16 millimeter.
When digital came along, that kind of opened up the ability to make films for
so many more people.
The more people who are making films, the more kind of stories that are being
told, the more different types of stories you're going to get.
Part of what a festival does is bring people together to watch all kinds of
films and have discussions afterwards and hear what a filmmaker was thinking
and engage in some real interesting conversations.
That night was the happiest moment of my life.
Ladies and gentlemen, please give it up.
for the director and cast of the godfather and the godfather part two
i've been asked by big shots how do you make a film that is successful
financially and also artistically and i i said to him risk
Good evening everyone and welcome to the 25th Tribeca Festival.
It's hard to believe that it's been half a century since the brilliant Martin
Scorsese delivered us Taxi Driver.
They
are
joined here tonight by other incredible artists.
at the heart of Taxi Driver, Jodie Foster and Paul Schrader.
Jodie was only 12 years old when she starred in Taxi Driver and Paul, the
extraordinary screenwriter who brought Taxi Driver to life.
Please join me in welcoming Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro,
Jodie Foster, Paul Schrader, and W. Elmo Bell.
Taxi Driver is about a disaffected young man who has problems connecting
romantically with women and hyper focuses on politicians in the wrong ways
and wants to be the hero in his own story. Why do you think this is relevant
today?
There was something absolutely 100% true and authentic about the
character's disaffection and loneliness that I didn't really understand but that
I knew was really true.
Mr. Scorsese, what do you think? Why has this film endured?
When I saw the cab, I began to realize that it's that arc of despair.
New York in the summer has got great steam.
The steam comes up, and the cab came through. It's, oh, my God. Look at that.
Somebody said, oh, it's supposed to be the hell metaphor. I wasn't making a
metaphor. It's the cab coming through the steam.
No? Really, really, it was.
Can we spare some words for that era of New York City and what it was like to
film in that era?
There was something in the shoot of the film that you could feel in the
temperature. You could feel a kind of violence all around you, and you could
taste it in a way. I mean, it was the city.
It was falling apart.
Really was falling apart.
Sitting there in the village saying, this is the greatest fucking place on
Earth.
It really was.
So I'm not going to be able to leave here alive if I don't ask about one
scene in particular from Taxi Driver.
Do you remember?
I think so.
Would you happen to remember what the famous line from that scene is?
Yes, I know it.
Are you talking to me?
I'll add one more thing.
I'm the only one here.
That's the point. That was the point. You're right.
It didn't matter how much we
expanded or grew.
We never forgot where we came from.
You're opening up the festival this year with a movie, United 93, which of course
tells the story of the flight that crashed in Pennsylvania.
You couldn't think of not opening the festival with the movie. Let's put it
that way.
We invited all the families to come to the festival.
They never felt part of the national grief.
That was for the Pentagon, and it was for New York.
They didn't talk about United 93.
This is a movie to see to be strong.
To be strong. Not to be afraid of nobody.
There were sobs in the theater.
It was people grieving.
We were there for each other, collectively, singularly.
It harkens back to why we built the festival in the first place.
Tribeca is not actually a triangle.
It's a quadrilateral.
That speaks to exactly what Tribeca is.
It's just kind of a little tilted, a little quirky, a little surprising,
unexpected.
It isn't just borders on a map.
It's a feeling.
It's a vibe.
At the heart, we are about a community and bringing people together.
And there's nothing like a New York audience because it's as diverse as
every point of view that can exist in the world. It's here in New York.
I feel like we're an audience festival.
That first festival it was about how many people we could bring downtown.
That first year David Bowie played.
Music became part of the festival
going forward because it was a way to celebrate and we needed to start to feel
good again.
Elton John performed, and he played your song and dedicated it to New York City.
This one's for you with my love.
Now we have Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus coming, and we had Nas come with his
time-ismatic film.
Nas is New York.
Hip-hop is New York.
Opening the Tribeca Film Festival, Robert De Niro comes out.
and introduces the film. This film tells the story of the making of an artist and
the making of an album here in our hometown.
It was a surreal moment, to say the least.
I want to thank Robert De Niro.
He plays me in all his movies.
Artists in the city, we're like born with this obligation to represent New
York. You have to express it in your art.
I love you.
Governor Cuomo just announced the first confirmed case in New York City. The
number of cases has climbed to 5,000. Coronavirus crisis in the nation's
largest city is exploding.
Bars, restaurants, entertainment venues shut down in an attempt to slow the
rapidly spreading virus.
In March of 2020, everything stopped.
New York shut down.
Almost overnight.
Theaters went dark.
Streets were empty.
We were one of the first festivals that had to pause during COVID.
I was struck by the fact that we started the festival to bring people
together. And COVID, we couldn't touch each other.
Tribeca is now helping New York rejuvenate post-COVID.
We've been through a grueling year, and it's been devastating, frustrating, at
times frightening.
Today, we're thrilled to be able to bring the Tribeca Film Festival to all
five boroughs as a tribute to storytelling and cultural richness of
every part of New York.
Tribeca will be the first in-person film festival to take place in all of North
America since the pandemic began over a year ago.
Well, first of all, congratulations.
Thank you. Thank you so much.
John Chu had one of his early short films here at Tribeca.
This is where we started.
When we came here for the first time, we were wide-eyed and innocent, within the
heights being there.
It couldn't have been more full circle for us.
We were back and it was this community in Washington Heights where we premiered
it, where we shot the movie.
So to come back there after being locked down, to be outside, just felt like a
return to not just home, but to normalcy.
It was like breathing air again.
You just saw people come back and just for an hour or two, they were able to
forget everything going on in the world and in their lives.
We bought the entertainment that was originally what Tribeca was all about.
It was amazing to see just New Yorkers being New Yorkers again.
Film has the ability to take people out of the world they live in and show them
other things.
That's, for me, the beauty of the arts.
You are able to share.
This is what I think, and this is who I am. Who am I doing downtown? I never
come downtown.
I hate downtown.
Artists reveal certain truths that some people are afraid to face, and that's
why they're artists.
At the end of the day, artists are just trying to point out what's going on.
Art is inclusive. It brings people together.
Tonight, art looks for truth.
Art embraces diversity, and that's why art is a...
is a threat that's why we are a threat to autocrats and fascists
and this isn't just an american problem it's a global one
unlike a film we can't just all sit back and watch we have to act
and we have to act now another suspected explosive was found in the mail that
package sent to the tribeca offices of actor robert de niro Bob is really
fearless in what he's willing to take on.
I feel betrayed by my country.
It doesn't have to be perfect, but it does need to return to the values that
gave us our strength and humanity.
And particularly proud of him and his voice as an independent, free
person speaking about the situation that we're living in.
Someone like Bob, when he uses his words, can bring people's attention to
certain issues.
You're always about lifting up everybody around you. Yeah, of course.
Why is that?
You have to.
You have to lift people up. Why? You have to bring them together.
Period.
You can't divide people.
You can't win that way.
It's a no-win situation.
We give out an award that the late Paula Weinstein started in honor of Harry
Belafonte for artists and activism.
Artists are the gatekeepers of truth.
This year, we're giving the Belafonte Award to Bruce Springsteen.
He's not afraid to fight back with his words, his music, and about what's been
going on in this country.
This past winter, federal troops brought death and terror to the streets of
Minneapolis.
Bruce is exactly the right person to write that lament, Streets of
Minneapolis, right at the moment when we all needed to hear it.
America tells its story in cinema.
Cinema is where the American dream was encoded before it was exported.
And what followed?
American music.
Johnny Cash was America.
Aretha Franklin was America.
Harry Belafonte was America.
Bruce Springsteen is America.
Some songs manage to change not just the room that they're recorded in, but they
can change the atmosphere of a time.
And we know how serious you feel, what you're feeling for your
country. I always work from the inside out, you know, so you're sitting around
and I'm just pissed off, you know. And, you know, if art has the chance to shape
culture... Culture shapes politics.
Culture and politics shape the nation.
And that's the business one.
Bruce Springsteen.
As if you didn't know.
If you look through history, the town is destroyed. People leave it.
They go to another place.
They didn't leave.
Instead, put back in and resurrected, really, the spirit of the city.
We had done a film, it was Gangs of New York at the time, and the draft riots
took place right here. And that was one of the worst riots in American history.
So these cataclysms occur, but it didn't stop the evolution.
I mean, Tribeca has become a festival you have to be thinking about in the
festival world wherever you are.
There's an energy downtown.
It's things going on in the streets.
It was a celebration, and it really said life goes on, and it really said film is
important.
It's like Coney Island for the soul. That's what the festival is.
And for me, it's always shiny that way.
It's super important to have these film festivals where people can actually
commune. communicate, and have a dialogue.
That's what it's about, really.
At film festivals, you're not arguing, you're listening.
And I think listening is becoming a lost skill.
The pillars that we've put in place in terms of artists and activism, hopefully
that's something that can bring people together for another 25 years.
There are so many of our new colleagues here that don't remember 9-11.
Some of you weren't even born on 9-11, 2001.
I want to invite all of you to the 9-11 Museum and Memorial.
We'll have a tour.
I've been a part of the museum since the beginning, and I'm excited about showing
it to you.
square memorial pools, the waterfalls, right? That's where the towers once
stood.
This is Foundation Hall. And Foundation Hall is an archaeological site.
So that wall has a lot of importance.
The slurry wall served as a symbol of resilience after the 9-11 attacks.
We're going through the story of 9-11.
but just as important is also what happened on 9-12.
People came together.
You suddenly got to know who your neighbors were that brought the festival
together and the community together.
New Yorkers and the rest of this country proved that it wasn't about rebuilding
the steel and glass It was about showing the world what we represent
That we're here for each other and that we will continue
to go on no matter what
Betty Smith!
There were deserts. I saw fountains. And like cream, the
waters rise.
And we strolled there together.
We learned to laugh or criticize.
I was dreaming in my dreaming.
God knows a pure view as I surrender.
into my sleeping i commit my dream to you
Can come to pass through a union We can turn the
world around we can turn
Can't find what you're looking for?
Get subtitles in any language from opensubtitles.com, and translate them here.