It was clear from the start that the premiere of Madonna’s new short film at the Tribeca Festival on Friday night would not be a quiet affair with polite applause but a makeshift party with dancing encouraged.
Madonna fans, still buzzing from her surprise concert in Times Square on Thursday, filed into the Beacon Theater on the Upper West Side of Manhattan just before 9 p.m., wearing T-shirts from her tours, black leather jackets and sequined ensembles. At times during the evening, they danced in the seats, gleefully shouting at the screen.
The short film, entitled “Confessions II,” features the first six songs from Madonna’s coming album of the same name, which will be released on July 3. That project is billed as a sequel to “Confessions on a Dance Floor” (2005). The film takes fans on a twisting journey through the many spaces where music thrives, including an arena, a car and a club bathroom. There is also a forest, where green lasers shoot from the pelvises of gyrating women.
After the premiere, Madonna joked during a Q&A with Anderson Cooper that she wanted to try the lasers, “but apparently they get quite hot.”
The roughly 10-minute film is stocked with cameos and Easter eggs, so much so that Madonna urged repeat viewings to catch all of them. Benedict Cumberbatch, Kate Moss and Debi Mazar all make appearances, as does Julia Garner, who has been cast to play Madonna in a biopic. Sabrina Carpenter joins the pop superstar to perform their duet, “Bring Your Love,” on a dance floor, and Madonna’s daughter Lourdes Leon plays a camera-wielding femme.
“Confessions II,” which premieres on YouTube on Monday, was directed by David Toro and Solomon Chase, known together as Torso. Madonna credited the film’s vision to them, though she said the idea to string together the songs into a film had come from her manager, Guy Oseary. Toro and Chase told Cooper that the project had been shot in New York, Los Angeles and London over the course of a month.
A self-proclaimed “cinema lover,” Madonna mused that these days making a film was more intriguing to her than making a music video. “It was good when it was just me and MTV,” she said of an earlier time.
The film also features the new song “Danceteria,” which takes its name from the New York nightclub where she got her start in the 1980s. “That time shaped my character,” Madonna said, recounting her early career and the wild nights she spent with Mazar, whom she used to kiss to “attract boys.”
The event was entirely phone-free; attendees were required to lock their smartphones and watches in Yondr pouches, which caught some guests off guard. (This reporter suddenly had to take notes by hand.) At one point during the conversation, Madonna lamented that technology had taken over our lives. While she enjoyed her time onstage with Carpenter at Coachella in April, she said, she frowned at the number of phones covering faces in the crowd.
“Cellphones have come between people,” she said. “I came to this earth to be a doer, not a watcher.”
Madonna said she hoped the new album would inspire fans to dance from start to finish, and on Friday she used an expletive to offer a piece of parting advice: Put the phones down and connect with one another.
Derrick Bryson Taylor is a Times reporter covering breaking news in culture and the arts.
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