Washington Heights, Christ & Toffee, Plus a Tree of Life Show Up at Tribeca

Christ looks on in Pulkit Arora’s short, “Milk Toffee.”

“Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world,” Jean-Luc Godard once alleged. Ah, if so, here is a fraud that is a stairway to many a truth, at least that’s what’s this year’s Tribeca Film Festival (TFF) persuasively demonstrates.

From an early handful of TFF offerings I’ve screened, there was not a bummer in the crop, just far-reaching offerings tackling various issues with an applaud-worthy savvy: DACA angst, love spurred on by Covid-19, sex trafficking, religious hypocrisy, alternative music posturing, Jewish childhoods in Brooklyn, musical takes on Black Lives Matter, aging while sitting next to a tree, arranged marriages, and a blind cat-sitter.

Eveyone has a sueñito in “In the Heights.”

Clearly, the Fest’s opening feature is the most highly publicized film of the year, In the Heights. The musical’s creators and performers have been interviewed by everyone but SpongeBob. At this writing, worrisomely for some, the film has not been breaking box office records, plus creator Lin Manuel Miranda’s been accused of Afro-Latinx erasure. Yet the production has inarguably broken Hollywood’s self-imposed taboos on depicting the Hispanic experience in the States, not to…