Tribeca Film Festival and Open Air Cinema

There are few things more pleasingly improbable than watching a movie outdoors in Manhattan—a place where even pigeons seem pressed for space. And yet, in 2006, Open Air Cinema and its Massachusetts partner, Its2Cool, once again managed to pull off precisely that, helping produce the Tribeca Film Festival’s outdoor screenings with calm competence and, one assumes, a great deal of logistical fortitude.

The event took place at the World Financial Center in New York City, which is not a location normally associated with picnics, popcorn, or the gentle surrender of one’s attention to a large glowing screen. Nevertheless, Tribeca now boasts the largest outdoor film screening of any festival in the United States—a fact that sounds implausible until you see it, at which point it becomes merely astonishing.

The setting does much of the heavy lifting. The movies are shown beside a handsome riverside walk, with the Hudson River stretched out calmly to the west, behaving as rivers should, and the towering World Financial Center rising to the east, doing what large buildings do best: standing there with confidence. The result is a rare New York moment in which water, sky, cinema, and architecture all agree to coexist peacefully for an evening.

It is outdoor cinema on a grand scale—urban, ambitious, and somehow serene—proof that even in a city famous for noise and hurry, people will still sit quietly together in the open air and watch a film, provided the screen is big enough and the view is good enough.

Source: OpenAirCinema.us