“You have to be used to change in New York,” Matthew Broderick remarks in “Raoul’s, a New York Story,” a documentary highlight of this year’s Tribeca Festival. The film centers on the celebrated French bistro, which opened in Soho in 1975 amid a cultural renaissance and became a fixture for local artists. Since then, survival of the richest has all but erased la vie bohème from the neighborhood in favor of a catwalk of retail storefronts — though Raoul’s is still standing, its arty interior nearly unmodified.
To Broderick, that’s just life in the city. “Everything we hold incredibly dear,” he says in an interview in the film, “took over for something that somebody else held dear.”
His remarks could very well be a slogan for the Tribeca Festival. Its obsession with novelty has, in recent years, made it an almost manically multifarious affair. Alongside movies, this year’s edition — which runs Wednesday through June 15 — will host video games, audio storytelling and an immersive program stamped with a catalog of acronyms: A.R., V.R., A.I. While festivals like Cannes are steeped in tradition, Tribeca is eager to be seen as a celebration of transformation, a festival of the future.
The zeal with which Tribeca pushes forward can feel exciting, but like an overactive online shopper, it also generates clutter. It’s hard to find the gems. Sampling this year’s lineup, I found that the most memorable world premieres sorted into two subsets: the near and the far. International standouts come from Korea, India and Chile — a long way from the Triangle Below Canal Street. Then there are the local discoveries, capturing a New York spirit that aligns with the festival’s setting.
Straddling both categories is “Raoul’s,” which tells the story of the Soho canteen by tracing its origins to Alsace, France, and then chronicling the Raoul men’s travels in Bali, Indonesia. The documentary was shot over a decade by Greg Olliver alongside Karim Raoul, who took over the restaurant’s day-to-day operations after his father, the founder Serge Raoul, suffered a stroke. As such, the film is as much a portrait of a local institution as it is a tale of a father and a son, exploring notions of legacy, heritage and what it means to sideline personal dreams for family obligations.
Perhaps my favorite Tribeca selection was another culinary affair: the Korean dramedy “People and Meat,” directed by Yang Jong-hyun. The film follows three older friends in Seoul suffering an omnivore’s dilemma: They crave beef but can’t afford the price. The seniors start visiting barbecue joints to dine and dash — or rather, dine and briskly walk away, as mobility allows. Humane and loaded with feel-good energy, the film is keenly attentive to how aging can make people feel invisible. Why not use the invisibility to their advantage?
Both “Pinch” and “Cuerpo Celeste” likewise follow characters feeling neglected, although here, the sufferers are young women. In Uttera Singh’s assured drama “Pinch,” the social fallout occurs after the protagonist (played by Singh) is groped by her landlord on an overnight bus ride. Reeling, she makes an impulsive stab at retribution that goes awfully awry, causing a schism in her apartment complex. As tensions escalate, Singh edits in frenetic images of Indian musical performances, using the drumbeats to build an agitated mood.
“Cuerpo Celeste,” from Nayra Ilic García, takes us to a post-Pinochet Chile in the early ’90s, where a teenager (a subtle Helen Mrugalski) copes with a tragedy involving her archaeologist parents. Much of the film takes place on the coast, where García and her cinematographer Sergio Armstrong — a frequent collaborator of Pablo Larraín — capture the dune-filled landscape in majestic tableaus. A sensitive coming-of-age drama, the film at points suggests the work of Lucrecia Martel, particularly during its slow build to a solar eclipse that García infuses with atavistic meaning.
Among the selections with a New York slant, the documentaries “How Dark My Love” and “Andy Kaufman Is Me” would make an enrapturing double feature. Each examines a provocative artist sacrificing for their craft, even when that craft weirds out the mainstream. The more stylistically inventive is Scott Gracheff’s “How Dark My Love,” which profiles the bizarro painter Joe Coleman and his wife, Whitney Ward. Sweetly eccentric, the film studies the couple’s love story as Coleman undertakes a monumental opus: a massive portrait of Ward — a photographer and dominatrix by trade — surrounded by miniaturist renderings of her life’s most meaningful moments.
If Coleman’s Bosch-like painting offers one perspective of Ward — as idol and muse — “How Dark My Love” deepens the likeness by granting us access to her in intimate moments of doubt, anxiety and frustration. Clay Tweel’s “Andy Kaufman Is Me” works similarly, despite its subject having died 41 years ago at the age of 35. As comedy fans are surely aware, Kaufman has inspired a smattering of recent bio-docs, but Tweel’s film makes a case for its eminence by hinging on the comedian’s as-yet unreleased audio diaries. Opining, word vomiting or just chatting with Grandma, Kaufman comes alive in the tapes, allowing fans a peek underneath the hood of the seminal entertainer’s aggressively chameleonic persona.
Speaking of aggressive: Can I interest you in a dark comedy about gun culture? Mere minutes into “Our Hero, Balthazar,” a mass shooting training organizer leads a simulation at a school in Manhattan, smearing kids with red paint and instructing them to play dead in the hallways. The film stars Jaeden Martell as Balthazar — Balthy for short — a rich city teen so used to performing his emotions for his phone camera that he has trouble telling real from fake, genuine from cynical. The same might be said of the film, which goes on to track Balthy’s online rapport — and then IRL friendship — with Solomon (an unrecognizable Asa Butterfield), a Texan internet troll who Balthy believes is planning a school shooting.
The feature directorial debut from Oscar Boyson (who was a producer on the Safdie brothers films “Uncut Gems” and “Good Time”), “Our Hero, Balthazar” — its title a reference to Robert Bresson’s “Au hasard Balthazar,” about a sad donkey — is best understood as an artist’s impression of the male loneliness epidemic, mapping out with uneasy irony what it means for a boy to become a man in today’s America. In Balthy, Boyson crystallizes a brave new generation who grew up around eight million people but came of age online, alone. Is that isolation dangerous? “Our Hero” thinks it might be. But the movie also seems to say: Change is here. Better get used to it.
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