Why Film Festivals Matter More than Ever with Cara Cusumano, Festival Director of Tribeca Film Festival

speaker-0 (00:01)
Hi and welcome to season three of the Technically Creative Podcast. I want to start by saying thank you so much to everybody who watches and listens to this podcast. We are so blessed to do this and we really enjoy it. But it is hard and when we get ⁓ feedback from everybody, it’s really encouraging and really keeps us going and seeing how much people have followed and liked and subscribed and listened on ⁓ Apple podcasts and Spotify. We’re just in

incredibly excited and encouraged and we want to thank you all for that. also want to thank all of the guests. mean, obviously I’m just a passenger here. Everybody’s here to actually watch and listen to the guests on here and I’ve just been incredibly lucky that these people have said yes. If I bring anything to this, it’s I’m sure not my interview style, but definitely it’s my dogged pursuit of wonderful people across technology and creativity and getting them to say yes and.

that I’m just incredibly grateful for. So thank you to them and thank you to you. And I won’t keep you waiting. This week we’ve got a tremendous guest. Kara Cusimano is the festival director of the Tribeca Film Festival, one of the great American film festivals and still one of the most important events in global filmmaking. Film festivals remain the path to legitimacy for filmmakers knocking on the door of the film industry. There were films moved from being made to being taken seriously.

where work is contextualized and debated and championed and ultimately absorbed into the wider cultural bloodstream. But in an industry under pressure from every direction, festivals are one of the last places where filmmaking is just celebrated in all its forms. And that role has only become more vital. We’re living in a moment where more people than ever can and do make films with off-the-shelf tools that rival studio production pipelines. So when everyone can publish,

The job of distinguishing what’s audacious from what’s just loud becomes a pretty Herculean task. As the noise increases in the industry itself feels increasingly fragile, I’d argue the role of festivals and their curators like Kara has never mattered more. Back in the 90s when I was falling in love with film, filmmakers like Stephen Soderbergh and Kevin Smith and Darren Aronofsky proved you didn’t need polish to make something powerful. Bad lighting and a handy cam

couldn’t actually ruin great characterization and a filmmaker’s voice and true artistic conviction. And even though consumer tools have improved, I think the same thing remains important. Taste, restraint, vision. And so with all of this change, I’m not really sure the role of the festival has changed much at all. Under Carr’s leadership, Tribeca has been notably forward thinking, particularly around AI.

Rather than sidelining creators who use new tools, the Festival has created clear, intentional frameworks that ask the same essential questions as ever. Is there a point of view here? Is there a voice here? Is there something human at the center of all this? And what’s especially wonderful is how clearly she loves film. Not as an abstract thing or an industry construct, but as a living, breathing thing. At one point in this, I ask her whether…

She actually watches everything and she chuckles and admits that she spends her life in fear of missing something great. And that to me moves beyond love and into dedication. And she’s someone who’s dedicated her life to film. It’s a beautiful reminder that behind every festival, every selection, every act of curation, there are human beings with taste and curiosity and a genuine sense of responsibility to the work and to the art form. People who care deeply about

finding the signal inside all of the noise. Kara Kusumano is doing the hard, invisible work of helping the filmmaking system continue to make sense of itself. Here’s my interview with Kara Kusumano.

Kera Kusumano, thank you so much for doing this. I know we had some scheduling conflicts and stuff like that. You’re incredibly busy, so I really appreciate ⁓ you taking the time to do this.

speaker-1 (04:10)
Thank you, I’m excited to be here.

speaker-0 (04:12)
Yeah, I’m super excited to talk to you. Obviously we’re in this time of incredible upheaval for films, box office, especially streaming AI, all of this stuff. One of the reasons I wanted to get you on the podcast is because I saw you guys doing the Sora short series with open AI and I thought, well, that’s really leading from the front as festival director for a festival as great as the Tribeca film festival. How do you see it responding to the current situation with all of the threats to the filmmaking industry?

speaker-1 (04:42)
Yeah, I mean, think Tribeca is maybe unique among film festivals because we’ve always had a bit of a technological focus and kind of a future of film way of thinking about things. were, you know, one of the first festivals that brought TV into the festival, which now feels like mandatory, but at the time was not really done. And now we have games, we have podcasts, we have music and…

The idea has always been that this is a storytelling first festival, that we are screen agnostic. And that was never really that controversial a thing to say until ⁓ AI. And I do think that it’s easy to have two minds about it. And I think that I think of our role in a couple of different ways, but always about the filmmakers and the creative community being at the center. So this is a new technology. We don’t know where exactly it’s leading. There are a lot of pros and cons and different ways of thinking about it. But.

but you really can’t have a point of view as an organization. We just have to be the place where that conversation can happen and where we can put filmmakers at the forefront of it and really put the tool in their hands. When we were doing that program with Sora, it was not publicly available yet. So it really was, what can this even do? And what does it look like when real filmmakers, all of whom were alumni of Tribeca Sundance Major Festivals, are working with the tool and what are they making? truly ask the question, you know? has to be open-ended. We can’t come to it.

with our point of view first of what the answer is. All we can do is put the right people in the right room with the right resources.

speaker-0 (06:08)
Yeah, cause it’s, it’s amazing. always kind of say creativity and storyteller are going to be fine. And in fact, there’s going to be more of it. The question is about whether specific infrastructure around parts of the industry will, will need to change. But really, as you say, that’s not really your editorial perspective. It’s just providing the place to celebrate independent filmmakers and storytellers in these mediums.

speaker-1 (06:31)
And if you can make a great story with different tools, know, the proof will be in the pudding in that way. And there’s so much resonance with other periods of film history when people stopped making movies on 35 and started making films digitally. The sort of transition of technology that at that time made it so much more accessible. So many more people could make a movie than ever before. And I think there’s something true about AI with that as well. And I have to make space for that. You know, I think there’s really value, something to be said for that.

But then all the other side of it, to your point, the things that the industry needs to figure out about IP and compensation and credit are all very, very valid questions that need to be worked through as well.

speaker-0 (07:11)
Yeah, it seems like we’re sort of relearning the lesson we learned in the late nineties when people like Kevin Smith came out with Clerks or Steven Soderbergh and Darren Aronofsky. They sort of showed us that actually the filmmaking look and feel didn’t really matter so much, so much as characterization and story did. And like, as people were filming things now on Handycams and that democratized and got a lot of people into storytelling and then festivals like yours championed those things and everybody went,

It doesn’t matter if it’s harsh lighting or over contrasty or whatever else, if the storytelling and the characterizations are good, that’s what’s ultimately gonna win out in the end anyway. I’m sort of learning it again, you know?

speaker-1 (07:52)
And I think… Truly,

and there are limitations to that as well. We had 13,000 submissions. When you’re watching the number of films that we’re watching, most of which are made on the microest of micro-budgets with very, very limited resources and amazing ingenuity, but you see a lot of… You can see those limitations on screen often, and that’s why the dinner party gone wrong movie is so common because that’s something you can do with your friends in your own apartment.

So selfishly, I’m like, imagine if these same amazing people and creators and writers and storytellers could make a movie in space and that cost the same. And wouldn’t there be like a whole new range of stories that are available for us to watch and to consume?

speaker-0 (08:34)
And as well, mean, I always feel like documentaries is the one place you’re not going to begrudge any documentarian for using AI because they just got to use whatever’s available to them. I mean, you and I first met when I was making documentaries and that was a very tiring, exhausting and not very lucrative life. And, know, you do it for the love of the story you’re telling and, and you have so little money to be able to put these things together. If you can use AI to

do what Passion Pictures did with something like Waiting for Sugarman and have these interstitial animations and things like that. God bless. I don’t think anybody’s going to begrudge that.

speaker-1 (09:11)
I think there’s a misconception. mean, you talked about when we did the Sora program, any backlash we got. The only backlash I remember hearing was sort of a general perception of you’re taking spots away from filmmakers to give to these films. And I think that there’s a perception in general that this is somehow supplanting, pure.

filmmakers or creativity instead of being an additive, instead of being a tool that those same filmmakers are using that could maybe even be creating jobs. They’re thinking about it as that start to finish, an AI is going to replace a creative storyteller instead of being a piece of that. It’s going to help with creating the budget spreadsheets or it’s going to help with juicing the graphics in a cool way and actually kind of create more opportunity for.

for creators. And we did not, in the end, actually take spots away from the film selection for those films either. Those were completely additive to the same program we’ve always done.

speaker-0 (10:06)
Yeah, it was a separate series and you have a couple of different kind of series from Tribeca X and the storytelling summit and things like that. I really feel like Tribeca and the Film Festers are like, they’re a stage for just showcasing who shows up and you guys are very good about making sure that there are enough different pockets for enough different people to be able to showcase themselves.

speaker-1 (10:26)
Well, that’s the hope and I think one of the great things about being in New York City because every film festival is fundamentally a site-specific local event for a local audience. And we’re just very lucky that our local audience is the greatest city in the world and the most diverse and with a hugely creative movie going audience, which is very liberating on the programming side because we are able to embrace everything and know that it’s going to connect with the right audience here.

speaker-0 (10:52)
It’s funny to me that some democratizing tools are looked down upon and some are celebrated. I mean, I don’t, I don’t remember anybody going, I can’t believe Sean Baker made a movie on an iPhone. Like how dare he when he did tangerine, everybody was kind of like, wow, you could do that. That’s amazing. It was so inspirational. I can see, I can see obviously where so much of it is coming from is this feeling that everything I watch is going to be this AI slop kind of stuff. But I think that the other thing is we also haven’t seen enough.

creators be using these tools. We’ve seen a lot of armchair social media people, but the more I see people like Jagger Waters and Reza and you know, Reza was in your program, the more I kind of go, ⁓ storytelling is going to be fine and this is just going to be a new medium for it.

speaker-1 (11:40)
I think there’s just fear and you know, no one got mad at Sean Baker for making a film with an iPhone because everyone had an iPhone and that wasn’t terrifying. But that’s why I feel like so much of what we can do is just put the tool in people’s hands and like help creators understand it, use it, hear about it, imagine how it could be worked into their practice and still absolutely free to say that that’s not for me. But I worry that if we just say that it’s a hard no, the door is closed.

The technology steamrolls the creators.

speaker-0 (12:11)
I mean, you know, obviously there’s between fear of, you know, I mean, we’ve watched this, the shift for, from streaming and that distribution channel has fundamentally hurt the studios. There’s fear about the, the filmmaking and film going experience changing. There’s fear about these new tools. You guys are a film and storytelling celebration factory. I mean, that seems to me really to be what you do is celebrating these people. Is that harder now or, or do you.

feel more of a sense of purpose because it’s more necessary.

speaker-1 (12:44)
It’s a weird time to be a film festival, especially because our submissions are up. They’ve been up, they went up through the pandemic, they went up through the strikes, they’re tracking up now. So people are making films, more people are making films, and our attendance is up. So more people are coming to films. If you were just going by the measurements of the Tribeca Festival, everything would look great. So is the reason behind that, people, more people are making films because COVID and the strikes.

put them out of their work and they have the time to finally realize that project they always wanted to do and more people are coming because independent cinemas are closing and this is becoming an increasingly rare opportunity for that audience to come together on film. So there’s, it’s hard, I don’t know exactly the answer. I hope that it means really positive things that there’s opportunity that in a time of lot of upheaval and traditional systems.

failing, get to build new ones. And Tribeca could be a place for that because we can try things out and we can show proof of concept for industry models on a smaller scale and see what works, what works for the creators, what audiences respond to, ⁓ and hopefully build something new.

speaker-0 (13:54)
You’ve been at Tribeca since 2008. You oversee programming across, you mentioned before, TV, music, film, interdisciplinary with things like Tribeca X and Sora Shorts. And how would you describe what your day-to-day actually looks like in the run-up to the festival? I almost envision you for three months sitting in a darkened room going, next.

speaker-1 (14:14)
There’s a bit more of like a beautiful mind with the big wall and like trying to put all the pieces together and draw the lines. Yeah. ⁓

speaker-0 (14:23)
live

wall with the red strings going for you.

speaker-1 (14:26)
We do this and we move that here. One of the I like about the job is that no day is, it’s not the same over and over. So my year has a rhythm to it. We lead up to the festival and then it happens and then there’s a bit of a kind of recharge period and then you start building again. So, you know, right now, which is as we’re speaking, early November, where ⁓ we’re kind of doing our reconnaissance. We’re doing a lot of meetings, kind of reconnecting with.

people in the industry that maybe we haven’t seen or caught up with since the festival in June. What’s new? What are you working on? What’s coming up? Do know what you’re submitting to Sundance? Do know what’s coming out in 2026? Hearing about how the festival went last year. This is also going to be our 25th anniversary festival. So great. Right now my day to day has a lot of kind of, does that mean? What are we doing? How do we celebrate?

What kind of, we want to do with our alumni? So trying to build something new specifically around this year while still executing all of the different programs that we have always done. And then as the festival gets closer, we go less sort of out of creative mode and more into production mode. Once the projects are all selected and the filmmakers are coming, then it’s really about like itineraries and schedules and ticket sales, which I also like too. I feel like I’m a ⁓ creative person who also loves a spreadsheet.

speaker-0 (15:43)
Well, that’s it. just described every producer ever. I always, I always kind of said that, know, my job was not particularly fun when you actually look at it. Producer sounds great, but at the end of the day, it’s schedules and, and Excel spreadsheet. It’s creative. You mentioned obviously the other festivals, Sundance, TIFF, South by can, how does Tribeca’s programming philosophy differ from those?

speaker-1 (15:47)
Yeah.

I think that the interdisciplinary nature of what we do is unique ⁓ and being a very ⁓ public audience festival in a major ⁓ global city at the same time as we are also an industry festival and also serve a function for the business of film is also, you know, I think a Toronto and a Berlin are kind of more in that model versus a Nance and Ken which are

primarily industry and harder to get to for the general public. And then a lot of regional festivals, which are purely public, they’re just about catering, bringing these films into their local audience. So blending those together. One of the things we used to talk about in the earliest days of the festival was discovery, innovation and community. And I really love those as kind of the pillars of what brings it all together, that everything we do is speaking to one of those, but often multiple of those with a storytelling as.

sort of the bedrock of it.

speaker-0 (17:07)
Yeah. The thing that surprised me when, you know, I was lucky enough to have a film be selected by you guys. what surprised me was the, there was this sort of healthy competition, seemed of horse trading amongst the, or with the filmmakers to kind of go, no, no, no, we’re going to showcase your film better than they will. And I mean, that is, is that a fun part of it? Is it just natural, healthy competition? I mean, it really felt like the best thing for us. mean, I, I know that I felt.

that we were getting the best deal possible because everybody was, we were so in communication with you and South By and Toronto, you know, and, at the end we were like, well, this is just the greatest thing that’s, that’s ever happened to our little film.

speaker-1 (17:48)
It’s funny, feel like filmmakers, it kind of comes down to premiere status, right? Which is like the very controversial idea among a lot of filmmakers. Shouldn’t you just be picking the best films and why is it so important that it’s a world premiere, that you’re the first festival that showed it? But I think of it in the opposite way of like, isn’t it better for the landscape of film festivals that each of these major festivals…

is presenting 100 new films every time instead of the same films over and over. Does a film really need to play every major festival? Is that continuing to add to its journey or is it more exciting to introduce new discoveries into the landscape? And at the end of the day, yes, isn’t that great to be a filmmaker and to have multiple festivals saying, pick me, here’s what I can do.

speaker-0 (18:33)
It was the best. I remember I had the great, I had what I thought at the time was a really strong analogy. And I’m sure everybody I was talking to thought I was an idiot, but, we were talking to you in South by and you know, you guys were both kind of saying, we want to be your premiere and whatever else. And our film was about Texas and the Texas state board of education. And I said,

Crocodile Dundee was way cooler when he was a fish out of water in New York. You don’t remember any of the scenes when Crocodile Dundee was in Australia, but you definitely remember when he showed up in New York. And I said, that was my reasoning. And I was like, we want to be at Tribeca. And you guys were just so great to us. And we had such a good time. it was, I think that that was also the other thing is I feel like with both South by Toronto, even Venice can certainly.

There’s this sense that when you go to the festival, that’s the only thing that’s happening in the world. And what I love about Tribeca is by the fact that New York is still going on around you about its regular day, Tribeca seems that few blocks that you guys just kind of take over and all of those theaters seems even more special because it feels like you’re leaving a bustling metropolis and entering a bubble within it that’s all about film, all about creators. And I just loved it so much.

speaker-1 (19:50)
Thank you so much. Yeah, it’s one of the things Jane Rosenthal, our co-founder and CEO, talks about the festival that, you in any other festival, you’re like competing with the other films that are coming out that weekend or you’re competing with, you know, local events and here you’re competing with Broadway and the Yankees and like everything else that’s going on in New York City on just any given weekend.

speaker-0 (20:09)
It’s such a special event. mean, you know, and obviously we’ve touched on it a few times. Your programming slate is famously broad with art house and docs and international and pop, popular stuff, television. How do you actually go around structuring the programming process to handle that level of editorial diversity?

speaker-1 (20:30)
You mean among the team, like sort of on the organizational side? So our team is, every sort of ⁓ vertical has a lead programmer. So there’s somebody who’s leading short films or somebody who’s leading podcasts or somebody who’s leading games. And they’re really, they each will have their own committees and their own teams, but they’re really putting together the slate that makes sense for that.

a year of that industry, something that’s really relevant to the creative community, specific to games and podcasts. And then it’s sort of my job and all of our job together to make sure all of that makes sense together. That it’s not just a quilt that stitches together the different siloed pieces of the festival, but that there are themes that emerge across that we’re putting creators who are coming for a specific section in conversation with others and there’s opportunities.

for them to meet each other in informal sort of social ways, but also in more structured ways to potentially collaborate. And I think that that resonates for audiences too, because this is how people consume stories. It’s nobody says, well, I’m a gamer and I don’t see movies or I only listen to podcasts. I think we’re all consumers of culture. And so making that all available to an audience in one place feels like it makes sense to me. That doesn’t seem like it’s a controversial way to program.

speaker-0 (21:49)
No, of course. But I wonder you when and how do you watch those themes emerge and what do you do to. Once you’ve identified them, like, mean, what does that process look like a little bit more?

speaker-1 (22:03)
It is

emerging, you know, we can’t be, ⁓ we can’t dictate it. We can’t come to the day one, our first meeting with a blank slate and say, okay, 2026 is gonna be about the environment or it’s gonna be about first time filmmakers because it has to come from what we’re actually seeing. It has to be organic. And I think the storytellers have the right instincts too. You know, we can’t be prescriptive in that way. So we have meetings cross-departmental within programming.

meetings where everyone’s just talking about what they’re seeing, what they’re excited about, what’s coming down the pike and listening for those sort of resonances. And then we might see something, you know, I’m probably most day-to-day involved with the features programming. So in that meeting, I’ll say there’s really something interesting. There was one year where it was a lot of actors making their first feature film. That was something that just was happening that year. And so we started to notice that. We brought it to the meeting and sort of…

told the group and then that was now something that other people could look out for in their various areas of expertise and sort of feed into the same thing. A few of the things that we do are maybe more prescriptive like we are the festival takes place just before Juneteenth and we have have done for the past few years a program called Expressions of Black Freedom about the black experience and that’s been very interdisciplinary and that’s something that we feel strongly about doing and it’s not like it’s not like there’s ever going to be a year where

We just didn’t see it in the submissions, you know? So ⁓ kind of putting that into the agenda to begin with of like, well, what’s going to populate this program? How are we talking about this this year? Is there a theme within that that we’re going to zero in on this year? And I feel like everything always happens pretty organically. I have certain benchmarks I like to hit of a certain number of.

films invited or confirmed by certain dates. Obviously we have certain press release or publications deadlines we have to work towards. But I feel like the decision making process and the thematic conversation that you’re talking about is very collaborative and very easy. There’s not a lot of contention when we’re talking about is it this or is it that and how are we talking about these things? Because everyone’s so passionate about what they’re seeing and what we’re programming.

speaker-0 (24:13)
The films that start coming in are the horse, not the cart. So you start seeing things and you go, I’m seeing trends here. I’m seeing things. actually this makes sense. And, and really get inspired from there. And then when you get into your spreadsheet era, you start going like, okay, like we want to program around these things that we’re seeing. And narratively, these sorts of projects fit within that.

speaker-1 (24:39)
Yeah, and I think there are broads, the feature film program, which is a little more than 100 films, is broken down into certain sections, competition, narrative competition, documentary competition, midnight for horror films, spotlight for maybe more star-driven projects, viewpoints, which is our section where we do more kind of formally challenging work or innovation, know, formally innovative projects. So we know that the…

Ultimately, we’re going to need to be finding 10 to 15 films for each of these. So we see something, we love it. Where does it kind of make sense? This could go in a couple of different places. Everything sort of starts to click into place. And then, maybe there’ll be a moment sometime in the end of the year, in the new year, where we take stock of everything and say, we’ve actually invited a lot more docs already than narratives. Let’s all kind of go back to everything we’ve seen and think about whether there’s some fiction films.

that really compliment well what we have because it’s not like we watch 13,000 films and then say, these are the top hundred. It has to make sense as a program. There are things that compliment each other. so there are plenty of films that are objectively good enough to play at the festival, but it’s about how you put them all together and what you want to say ⁓ for your audience in a given year.

speaker-0 (25:54)
And I imagine there’s a sort of comfort in knowing, if it’s good enough to play in our festival, likely it’ll be picked up somewhere else if it’s not fitting our, what we’re looking for, particularly this, or the way we can’t find a place for it in our programming slate.

speaker-1 (26:07)
Totally, and every year we see that. I think that’s the other thing is that people often think we, if they don’t get into a festival, you know, there’s so much, I understand that’s really hard. Often you’ve submitted months ago and you’re getting a letter that’s clearly a form letter. And it’s easy to think my project wasn’t taken seriously or my project is terrible and a failure. But truly we couldn’t do this job if we hated 12,900 of the…

projects that were submitted. I love watching movies and I still remember so many of the films that we didn’t show for whatever reason. So I hope that people feel trust being part of this process, you whether it’s at Tribeca or at any festival, because people who want to be professional programmers do it because they love movies.

speaker-0 (26:52)
You mentioned in their, you know, star vehicles and things like that. How do you balance championing indie voices with programming big pop cultural films with a lot more resources and that are clearly coming out of the traditional industry.

speaker-1 (27:07)
the festival can serve multiple functions for any given film. And I think we try to have a pretty bespoke experience depending on what the film’s goals are, but primarily that falls into, am looking for distribution, I’m premiering the film at the festival because I want the industry to see it, I wanna get good reviews and have audiences love it and then someone wants to buy it. And then I’m launching out of the festival. So New York is the capital of.

in the world and I can come and do a big red carpet and get a ton of attention and then my movie will be available in theaters or on streaming a few days, weeks, months later and can kind of ride that publicity into a successful launch. So I like to think that we ⁓ are successful at both of those things and it’s just a different positioning for each project as it comes into the festival down to what day and time we are looking to screen it.

which badges sort of have access how we invite people. And I think that there’s there’s a all ships rise sort of feeling that sometimes with you, with a big star driven vehicle, maybe as an opening night or as a big tent pole, you can attract a lot of press who are coming for a specific event, but then cover the whole festival and you end up seeing.

you know, small foreign language documentaries getting coverage in People magazine, to me that’s the system works. That’s exactly what we’re trying to achieve. And also again, ties back to what I said before about it’s how people really consume too. You know, I think people watch both. They like documentaries, they like a challenging film and they like a popcorn movie. I mean, that’s what I like.

speaker-0 (28:39)
Yeah, I imagine actually the sort of fragmentation of attention that everybody else bemoans, which is, people have that sort of schizophrenic editorial appetite, you know, when deciding what to watch. I imagine that for a film festival, that’s terrific. You you want people coming in going, well, I watched a murder documentary last night. I woke up, I watched a verticalized thing on my phone and then I did something else. You know, that’s the type of person who’s going to thrive at a festival.

speaker-1 (29:05)
It’s a festival and it’s a convention and it’s, mean, I love going to festivals too. I like waking up at 9 a.m. and watching six movies in a row, going to a party and passing out and doing it all again. So we hope that people come and have that experience that they’re not coming for just one thing, but they’re actually putting all these things in conversation together in their own mind and in their own experience the same way that we have as the program.

speaker-0 (29:28)
What are the, what are the soft power elements of the festival? Cause obviously, like you said, there’s loads of parties, there’s loads of kind of things happening. How much of a responsibility does Tribeca kind of, or do you as an institution take on going, yeah, we want to be like throwing and hosting and doing these things because the more of these creatives that get together and talk about craft or talk about story, the more we’ve also been a platform for them to ideate for whatever they’re going to do for next year.

speaker-1 (29:57)
Yeah, and we’ve created more, I mean, there’s the sort of party atmosphere that you’re talking about. We have a director’s brunch, we have a welcome party, like just making sure that people actually meet and know each other. But we have some more structured elements of our program too. We have a program called the Creators Market, where people can come with projects that are pitches, that are scripts, that are works in progress, and we will help them get meetings. And again, bringing the sort of interdisciplinary point of view, those…

people can come from anywhere in the festival. Maybe they have a project that’s in official selection somewhere and they’re pitching a new project. They could be gamers, they could be podcasters, they could be traditional feature short filmmakers. And what they’re pitching doesn’t necessarily have to be the same kind of thing that they have at the festival. So I’m just trying to create that cross-pollination, make people meet people they wouldn’t have otherwise met. You mentioned the Storytelling Summit at the beginning, which is a program we launched last year.

that’s meant to be for the broader industry. And one of the things I would hear sometimes is, I love Tribeca, I come all the time. I don’t have a project this year in the festival, so I’m not really sure how to participate. So just creating a forum where you can come and it’s, host panels, we host cocktails. It’s just more of like a congregation environment for the broader industry. And so that everybody feels very welcome and invited and they can share their expertise, whether that’s on stage or just in conversation.

felt like that was a really valuable addition to what we were doing and it was much more successful than we were even expecting it to be last year. So clearly there’s appetite for that.

speaker-0 (31:29)
I remember I was very lucky. Obviously we had revisionaries one year and then we had another film, God We Trust, about Bernie Madoff the second year. And I went the third year and I was like, I felt like the bell of the ball for two years. But I did get to actually enjoy it more. I think I spent so much more time that third year doing exactly what you said, rolling from this theater to that theater, this theater to that, and just.

Like I’ve been to IDFA ⁓ in Amsterdam and that’s the same thing. It’s only three theaters and they’re all right next to each other. So you’re just kind of bouncing around. And it was so fun and there’s so much great stuff to be doing if you’re not showing there. And actually a lot of times your showings get in the way of being able to see so much of the great stuff that’s going on.

speaker-1 (32:17)
Truly, sometimes I’ll be chatting with filmmakers at the festival and ask them, like, I’m dying to talk about these movies because we saw them months ago and we’re the only people who’ve seen them. They’re finally out in the world. So I’m what have you seen? What do you love? Finally have someone to talk to. I’m taking care of my parents who are here from around the world.

speaker-0 (32:35)
Yeah. that’s great. I mean, you you guys have been a kind of early champion of directors like Nia DaCosta and Damien Chazelle and Ryan Coogler. This is a tricky question, but when you see early work of people who clearly are destined for great things, is there a common thread? What do you see and feel when you’re seeing it that early? You’re seeing it before the trades have had a chance to go up becoming.

Blah, blah. Like all of the adjectives that are gonna be described, describing these directors for the next three years and everybody else can jump on the bandwagon. You’re seeing them out of the gate and going, my God, we have to showcase this. This is tremendous. And what is that feeling? What’s that X factor or special sauce?

speaker-1 (33:21)
I mean, that’s the sort of drug that you’re chasing as a programmer all the time. Every time you put something on is like, this could be the one. This could change everything. And I’m the first person. We’re the first people seeing these movies outside of the film teams almost every time, multiple times per day. So yes, there’s nowhere you can go to say, well, did it get good reviews? Or how did it sell at the other festival? Or did audience win any awards? Everything’s a blank slate.

So I do think when you have the volume of submissions we do and you watch the volume that we do, there is a certain sameness that you tend to see, you know, a lot of similar narrative choices, similar visual styles. People kind of fall back on what they’re familiar with, a kind of conventional filmmaking style. So a lot of movies we see are not bad. They’re just, you know, similar to films we’ve seen before in their choices. So anytime people are making different choices.

that stands out. And sometimes there’s things that are weird for the sake of weird, or, you know, then you can get into the conversation about whether those choices were successful. But it has to start at there’s some kind of uniqueness of vision that that and that could be in any play that could be in the story itself.

or the structure or the visual style or a performance, but you’re showing me something I’ve never seen before and I watched this number of movies, that’s incredible. And of course the names that you mentioned are some of the most successful discoveries that we’ve had, but we believe in every film that we show and we believe that there’s people with that potential. All the films have that potential and you can never totally predict what’s going to pop or who’s gonna be able to capitalize on that opportunity or.

have the right opportunities presented to them. So certainly we put this kind of menu together every year and put it out to the industry and hope and try to do everything we can to support people because we believe in all of them.

speaker-0 (35:10)
Yeah, that’s, that’s terrific. I once worked with a director who he was deciding what to do, two different things and he chose one and he would, he would equivocate it for a moment. And then he chose one. I said, why that one? He goes, I don’t know. I don’t have an answer. It’s just more interesting. I think that a lot of people run to narrative safety or very often only want to take one big swing in a project. And I think that you’re right. When you see filmmakers who are undeniably doing things that most others wouldn’t.

Especially because we see so much media nowadays. We’re constantly being inundated with things. It can get very samey very fast. Do you think that has anything to do, I mean, this is not in my notes or anything, but do think that has anything to do with why there seems to be a pullback from the box office when it comes to large bombastic, marvelous storytelling that we’re kind of going, okay, when people are spending that amount of money.

They tend to be a little bit formulaic and actually we’re more interested. Yeah.

speaker-1 (36:09)
I think audiences are so much more literate than we give them credit for, you know? People, you can see the twist coming a mile away. Everybody thinks they have a twist. It is always predictable. people, because everybody watches a lot of stories, a lot of TV, a lot of short-form content, a lot of films. And I think that there, you have to stay ahead of your audience and it is so much harder than you think it is.

speaker-0 (36:32)
And it feels like we, again, we keep learning this lesson every few years. It’s like movie making was formulaic and then the seventies happened and it really wasn’t. And filmmakers trusted the audience to understand what was happening. And you know, then you had those wonderful movies like Kramer versus Kramer and Midnight Cowboy. And you had this real, you know, a Renaissance. And then I think filmmaking became very formulaic in the eighties.

And then comes the nineties and then you’ve got, know, this new wave of indie filmmaker and Sundance and all those kinds of things. And suddenly filmmaking isn’t formulaic again and it’s pushing boundaries and it’s giving, ⁓ it’s giving audiences trust and belief that they’ll figure it out. And we sort of keep learning this lesson.

speaker-1 (37:15)
We’re

right for the next one. know, I grew up with one of those 90s movies and those Sundance movies and that’s what made me want to do this and work at festivals. And so I think that that’s the drive. Every time we’re putting new films on and opening for submissions, it’s like, where’s the movement? That’s what we want to find is those voices that can kind of knock us out of the complacency.

speaker-0 (37:37)
Yeah. There’s another question I wanted to ask, which was about shorts. Shorts have become a big part of Tribeca’s programming. and as a producer, mean, you listen, I was a producer of documentaries as well as commercials and lots of other things, but documentaries, there was already no money in it. And even I looked at shorts and went, well, there’s even more no money in that. I’m not doing that. But you know, it is undeniably a great place for.

filmmakers to learn and it’s a huge part of your programming. You know, what role does shorts play in talent discovery and also talent education, them learning about their craft?

speaker-1 (38:17)
Yeah, shorts are really interesting because we, it’s grown so much and this past year we actually started a shorts theater because we’d been putting them in sort of smaller houses and they were consistently turning away the largest numbers of like ticket buyers. They fill up so quickly. And our box office was saying you have to be putting these programs in a bigger house. So we created a house. We built a theater that was 250 seats.

that would only be for short film premieres and it was a huge success. And at the same time, our short submissions go up and up and up and I think we’re at close to 9,000 short submissions for last year. So there’s a big audience and there’s a big drive from the creators as well. It’s not financial. that no one’s getting a huge paycheck to do these, but of course there’s amazing talent that launches that way and I hope that we can provide a platform that really puts that on.

the same level as everything else we’re premiering. think our Shorts team would push back on the idea that it’s a place to learn or that it’s a place to do a proof of concept for a feature, that this is its own art form. And there are people who are career short filmmakers and it’s a place where people are, you can discover real new voices that then go on to other forms of storytelling. But we think of that very much in the same way. We think of the whole festival that the same story or different stories can work in different mediums. If you’re a great storyteller,

why limit yourself to I only make 90 minute features or I only make episodic TV that all of this can kind of bleed together.

speaker-0 (39:49)
And undeniably, they each have different rules. mean, you in general, when you’re watching a short, directors who come to it going, I’m going to tell it by the same rules as feature film. And they start with long establishing shots and, know, and, things like that. They tend to be using the feature language in the shorts area. And I’ve always found that the shorts that are most successful in my book are the ones that have almost operate more by.

social media language where they start with a big hook. They start with something that’s really happening and you’re immediately transported into a world and you’re forced to figure it out. As you said about ⁓ them being their own medium with their own rules, it feels like, yeah, it’s great to be celebrating.

speaker-1 (40:36)
Yeah, and I think our shorts programmers would probably say that it’s a ding against a short if the feeling is, this is auditioning for a feature, or they really want this to be a feature. And it has to embrace the medium that it is.

speaker-0 (40:50)
And I think that people also don’t realize the sort of laws of unintended consequences. know, like I always felt that one of the reasons that documentaries got so good is because so many more people started working in reality television. had an industry built up around editors and camera people and everybody trying to extract drama from, from real life situations. And then docs got insanely better because you had all of these crew who were really good at that now going, I want to tell a story about this. And then suddenly they had all this.

real world capability. I think the same thing is YouTube is creating better shorts creators because, and then everybody originally said YouTube was kind of the it’s era’s version of slop. And now you have so many people getting confident in short form formatting and suddenly shorts are improving vast.

speaker-1 (41:39)
Yeah, I mean, the documentary thing is interesting because I think it’s that, it’s also the audiences, know, suddenly non-fiction, everyone was very literate in non-fiction in quotes with reality TV. that and that documentary became liberated from its own genre. Like a documentary is the genre. A documentary can be a comedy, it can be a thriller, it can be a horror movie. And that was suddenly a game changer and documentaries became amazing so fast.

because they were being made in such so many different kinds of ways which hadn’t been the case for a long time.

speaker-0 (42:11)
Yeah, Michael Moore actually called our film a horror film. The one about the Texas State Board of Education. was like, that’s the scariest film I’ve seen this year.

speaker-1 (42:22)
A vivid memory of your film. Can I side? Sure. A vivid memory of your film premiering.

speaker-0 (42:28)
Anyone who has a memory of that film, I’m thrilled.

speaker-1 (42:31)
It was, so the subject of your film was a local politician who was putting conservative messaging into textbooks in Texas and then those textbooks were going around the country. And he believed he was doing the right thing. So he was very like open, like completely open to the film and stood by it. Even though those of us who don’t agree with this, we’re watching it, like you said, like a horror film. And because of this, he came to the premiere. He was fully like ready to greet his public and do a Q and A. And then between your team and our team, there was so much hand wringing.

about putting this guy on stage in front of a New York audience and like they’re gonna tear him apart, what’s gonna happen, like we have to have an exit strategy if this gets too heated. ⁓ I was doing the Q and A because it was like bringing out the big guns, like I was gonna be able to control this crowd. call on the very first person in the audience and he raises his hand and he’s like.

speaker-0 (43:09)
I remember that.

speaker-1 (43:20)
I just want to give you a round of applause for being brave enough to like come represent this film in a very hostile and friendly audience and like be here and have the conversation with us. And they all applauded him. And I was just so proud, so proud of us in that moment that like it was, it ended up being such a thoughtful, interesting conversation that everyone took so respectfully, him and the audience. And I was very moved by it. So I remember that so well.

speaker-0 (43:47)
That’s lovely. think the first question I had to you was afterwards, did you plant that person? Did you? Did you? Hey, someone asked that question. my dad. Because it did. It was like, you know, and I’m not sure everybody else was as stressed as we were, but it did. It kind of let the air out of the balloon a little bit. It was like, okay, this is going to be all right.

speaker-1 (44:07)
they’re not gonna tear them apart.

speaker-0 (44:10)
Yeah, we were very protective of Don, actually, because, like you said, he… I think that was the wonderful thing about the movie, is that he looked at what he said up there and he was like, damn right. You know, and we did try to be incredibly balanced. And interestingly, we went to Texas and we showed it in Texas. The crowd there was very upset. That’s just saying. Yeah, no, no, no, they did not handle it well at all and they were…

really negative because it’s a film going liberal crowd and they took it very poorly. And Scott, certainly our director had to be the one to say that and say, Hey, listen, guys, by the way, you could have all voted against this. Like he’s who are, he’s where opportunities you had to vote. so, you know, and, and we get it, but Don’s given his time. And I remember that being a huge thing throughout our, our run as it were, our, our travels.

was really protecting Don because you’re right, somebody who’s willing to stand there and defend their opinion, and we’ve seen it as well with Charlie Kirk. mean, that’s somebody who is willing to stand there as defend his opinion against as many people came to him as possible. And I think that we were really proud of Don and we were really very protective of him as a result of that. And you guys understood it from moment one.

speaker-1 (45:34)
There was something a little naive about him. He felt like feeding a sheep to the wolves. He didn’t understand what was gonna happen. But he did good. He did great.

speaker-0 (45:45)
Yeah. And he was such a sweet guy. And I mean, for years he would send me cause I’m, you know, I’m obviously a liberal in, very many ways, but I also was raised Catholic and I still go to church every Sunday. And it’s what drew me to that, that story. But Don and I used to email these really epic emails to each other every month or other month about, you know, theology and, and things like that. And he was just absolutely passionate about it.

speaker-1 (46:11)
I love it. mean, and isn’t that so much better than if we just put a bunch of movies up on screen that are going to tell everyone in our audience that everything they think is the best and they’re right about everything and they don’t have to talk to anybody who disagrees with them? Like, yawn.

speaker-0 (46:26)
Yeah, respectful disagreement can be incredibly fun apart from anything else.

speaker-1 (46:31)
And I think it’s just gotten so hard in the world to do that outside of movies. I think that maybe that’s the only place that we can really, that’s left, where you can empathize with a different story and sit with it. So I still believe that there’s that potential.

speaker-0 (46:48)
Well, yeah, I mean, so just to get into, know, as we’re kind of reaching the end of the hour, I don’t want to keep you too long, but I would love to talk about, know, you mentioned submissions are up. Obviously more people are going to have more tools and that’s going to make, always makes creators think more on the horizon. They always want to look further ahead. So they’re going to be creating more scripts, more films, more content, all of that stuff. You know, AI is, also.

lowering the barrier to creation on a much higher level. From your vantage point, what does that mean for film festivals and artistic discovery? Does your job even change really at all? Or do you have to respond to creation hitting the hockey stick curve?

speaker-1 (47:34)
I mean, think the thing that we think about is sort of the what’s next and what is the role that we play as a curator and the same line of thinking that brought us to adding podcasts or adding games, which are not traditionally the fields, within the field of what a film festival would do. But those were things that had a huge amount of creativity, a huge audience, maybe an audience that was struggling to find things they would connect with because of volume.

And that we could step in as curators and you know our brand, you know what we stand for. So we’ve gone through all the films, all the games and all the podcasts and we’re presenting a curated list of 10 or 12 that we think are really worth your time the same way we would for films. And those things have been really successful. I mean, for me, thinking one of the things I’m thinking about is kind of like the creator economy. We’ve touched on it a couple of times briefly, but the world of online creators who

you know, arguably don’t need curation or gatekeeping. Like they’re connecting directly with their followings. But I do think there’s a place for discovery there and finding voices that maybe haven’t hit their huge audience yet, but are sayings are doing something cinematic or something really valuable in storytelling and connecting them with a bigger audience, but also connecting them with the traditional film industry. Again, trying to do that cross pollination. You know, one of the…

that we spotlighted at the festival two years ago is a new cast member on SNL. So like that’s a great story ⁓ and anywhere that we could help find someone and give them visibility, even if it takes them into a different arena, I think would be, we’d consider ourselves doing our job. So maybe it’s that, maybe it’s micro dramas, know, all the different things that you’re hearing about trying to figure out what’s a flash in the pan and what’s really gonna be a new field of storytelling that we could help support.

support creators, support audience, and support industry.

speaker-0 (49:28)
Are you seeing, mean, in the, cause obviously you’ve, you know, there are certain buckets, but obviously a lot of the AI test stuff is going to start touching all of the submissions, would assume, or, or greater and greater numbers of them as it becomes a standard tool used for post-production standard tool used for plating and things like that. Are you already seeing it in this year’s class or this year’s perspective class?

speaker-1 (49:52)
Films that use AI? Yeah, definitely. And it’s interesting because we give people the option when they submit to, you you can tag your film any number of things. It’s so comedy, it’s a New York film, and AI is one of the things people can tag with. So we’ve seen films about AI or see films that use it, but I think there’s more. You know, there are a lot of films that would use AI as part of their production in some capacity that would then not check the box when they’re submitting. And I feel like you’ve already seen some stories like that.

speaker-0 (49:54)
Yeah.

speaker-1 (50:22)
come out later that, you know, the brutalist used AI in some way. And I think that that’s more likely, that’s more what’s happening versus the novelty of this is the first feature-length film made entirely with AI. I don’t know that that’s what we’re looking for or that’s really the right next step, although I would love the Blair Witch Project moment. what’s the film that’s gonna make it undeniable? I don’t think anyone’s made that yet.

speaker-0 (50:50)
was talking to Brady Corbett ⁓ producer and he was saying, you know, what he did gave more people work. The rigor he was showing about dialect meant that more like we, we either wouldn’t have done anything. Then we engage somebody else and this AI tool. Like we gave more people work at the end of the day. And that just comes from an imperfect understanding of what AI is, what it does, where it’s used. And you know, now it’s just this kind of blanket fear.

speaker-1 (50:57)
I guess.

Yeah, I heard Jane, or Jane say the same thing about the Sphere, where she also works that in the visual effects world, like, they were employing more people than anyone else, ⁓ and because they were able to use this tool, but, you know, the visual effects industry is stretched so thin.

speaker-0 (51:36)
Yeah. mean, and that’s the thing is the visual effects industry has been so tech forward for so long. mean, you, you could sort of say that like, you know, when they figured out the algorithm for hair, you know, that was, you know, back in the early two thousands, they really got hair right on a CG standpoint. And that’s just a little plugin that you have to get that goes into the flame and then helps you render hair. You know, and, and for them, they just always see these tools and they just see what’s next or, know, and.

where can we use it in the pipeline? But really the issue that they’re facing is more of an economic one about the margins falling across their business. And it is gonna drive some people into the hands of AI, but it’s not AI forcing the cost changes, it’s the cost changes forcing them to run into the hands of AI.

speaker-1 (52:25)
Hmm, interesting.

speaker-0 (52:26)
Not always, but most of time, just as a kind of parting question, is there something that you wish more artists or filmmaker understood about the festival programming experience or how they interact with the festival either when they’re ho with their hopes of getting in or with their experience of actually participating.

speaker-1 (52:45)
that filmmakers may be embarking on this process with Tribeca, but with festivals more broadly sort of think of us as allies and champions and trust us. I worry sometimes when I sit on panels, there’s so much skepticism about like that, like that we’re looking for reasons to not show a film or the perpetual question I get is like, do you really watch all the movie? And it’s so counterintuitive to me because I live my life in fear of missing something. Like the worst thing that could happen would be

it fell through the cracks and it was amazing and we could have been the ones to discover this amazing storyteller. So I’m constantly circling back and double checking and watching something again. And then I sit on a panel and people say, do you really watch all of everything? ⁓ So I hope that we can build trust. ⁓ And I have an email address. We can talk about these things. I can’t talk to people, but I like getting emails about people, what they’ve submitted and.

⁓ and get excited about what there is to see. So we’re fans and champions. We like new ideas. We like cool movies. We’re very much in the same corner here.

speaker-0 (53:54)
Yeah, I really do look at festivals like yours and festivals in general, and just think to myself, filmmaking’s fine and creativity is fine and storytelling is fine. You know, the box office will find a way to sort itself out, but really these things are, are being taken care of by custodians like yourself. Well, anyway, thank you, Kara. This is just so, I really appreciate you sitting down with me and, it’s, it’s so nice of you and, and, you know, I have great memories of us being at Tribeca and you’ve been so

generous with your time. really appreciate it.

speaker-1 (54:27)
Thank you. This was really fun to get to talk about everything and I hope you’ll come back for the 25th anniversary.

speaker-0 (54:33)
I will, that’d be great. Fantastic, I’ll be there.

So that was my chat with Kara Cusimano. She’s great. One of the things that I remember about her as well is that obviously, you know, when you’re in the festival, lot of tensions are running high. know, A, it’s a big event that she’s sort of in charge of. But as well as a filmmaker, you’re there stressing out. I remember when the lights dimmed and our film was being showed there for the first time, I had a panic attack and I had to leave the theater. But the wonderful thing about

somebody like Kara, ⁓ she’s a really calm presence. ⁓ And she just has such a deep knowledge of film and such a deep love for it. That’s one of things I really like about her the most. I hope you enjoyed that. Please tune in next week. Next week is our first ever special episode, which is a Super Bowl episode. We’ll be speaking to Mark Gross of High Dive Advertising, the founder and creative director of High Dive.

and his client, Chris Bellinger, who’s the chief creative officer of PepsiCo Foods. We’re gonna be talking about their spot last year, ⁓ directed by Taika Waititi for Lays, and what they’re doing this year. And of course, the Super Bowl will happen in between that time, ⁓ we’ll be talking about what has just happened. Anyway, we’ve already recorded it.

We’ll be airing it after the Super Bowl, but it’s the closest we’ve come to doing an episode in real time. So it’s new for us. We’re trying new things. I hope you like it. I hope you’ll tune in next week. Thank you so much for listening and I’ll see you soon. Bye bye.