21 international film festivals, including Berlin, Toyko, Sundance, Venice and Toronto, helped curate the more than 100 titles that will stream on YouTube from May 29 until June 7.
Tribeca Enterprises and YouTube have unveiled the lineup for the inaugural We Are One: A Global Film Festival, an online event launched in response to the novel coronavirus pandemic and the cancellation of traditional film festivals worldwide.
Some 21 international film festivals, from Berlin, Toronto, Sundance, Locarno and San Sebastian to Tokyo, Macao, Mumbai and Guadalajara, helped curate the We Are One program, which will be a mix of new films and gems from previous fests.
Highlights include the world premiere of Iron Hammer, Joan Chen's documentary about legendary Chinese Olympic volleyball star Jenny Lang Ping, and Eeb Allay Ooo!, a satire from director Prateek Vats, about the professional "monkey repellers" in New Delhi, which won the Golden Gateway honor at last year's Mumbai Film Festival.
Several of the former festival titles will have their online premieres during the We Are One event, including Cherien Dabis' Amreeka, the story of a Palestinian single mom and her teenage son who immigrate to small-town Illinois, which won the Fipresci critics honor in Cannes in 2009; and David R. Romay's thriller Beyond The Mountain, the big winner of the 2018 Guadalajara fest.
"We are so excited to share the combined efforts of our festival partners and YouTube with the world this week," said Tribeca Enterprises and Tribeca Film Festival co-founder and CEO Jane Rosenthal. "Together, we were able to curate a compelling slate of programming that succinctly reflects the subtle variations in style that make each festival so special."
Documentaries are a particular focus, with such titles as Rudeboy: The Story of Trojan Records, about the legendary London-based reggae label; Ricky Powell: The Individualist, a documentary about legendary street photographer Powell featuring interviews with Natasha Lyonne and LL Cool J; and Mugaritz B.S.O., a meditation on food and music from Spanish director Felipe Ugarte, which first premiered in the Culinary Cinema section of the Berlin Film Festival in 2011.
The lineup also includes dozens of fiction and documentary shorts, among them Bilby, Marooned and Bird Karma — the first shorts made by Dreamworks Animation — and the world premiere of Yalta Conference Online, a doc created exclusively for the festival by Japanese director Koji Fukada.
We Are One's VR section will feature Emmy-nominated documentary Traveling While Black and Atlas V, a sci-fi narrative starring Bill Skarsgard.There will also be special musical performances, including a 30 minute DJ set by Questlove.
Among the small screen highlights of the We Are One festival will be the Israeli series Losing Alice, a psychological thriller about an 40-something female director who becomes obsessed with a 20-something femme fatale screenwriter. The series will premiere its first episode online at the We Are One festival before its broadcast in June on Israeli network Hot. Losing Alice will screen in competition at television festival CanneSeries, which runs October 9-14.
In addition to the films and series, the We Are One fest will stream several curated talks, both archived from past festivals and brand new discussions, featuring the likes of Francis Ford Coppola with Steven Soderbergh, Song Kang-ho and Bong Joon-ho, Jane Campion and Claire Denis.
The We Are One festival will run exclusively on YouTube from May 29 through June 7 at YouTube.com/WeAreOne. On every film page there will be a donate button allowing viewers to contribute to organizations, including the WHO, UNICEF and Doctors Without Borders, helping on the front lines of the COVID-19 crisis.
The full festival schedule is available here.
