Original subtitles

Nice sunny day.

And the only chance of a shower for the rest of the workweek

might be late Thursday or Thursday night.

Get ready for the second coming of Air Jordan.

Primary day in the polls are open in New York City.

Black voters are deciding among about 250 candidates.

John and I hung out with him one night

for a couple of hours, and I just...

Giants lose their opener

in Monday Night Football in Denver.

Yankees and Red Sox washed out in the Bronx.

How many sugar?

Good morning. 64 degrees.

It's Tuesday, September 11.

I'm Lee Harris.

Here's what's happening.

It's 8:52 here in New York.

We understand that there has been

a plane crash on the Southern tip of Manhattan.

You're looking at the World Trade Center.

I was just about to go away out

of town for that day, and my flight was canceled.

I went back downtown and already checkpoints

had been set up in Canal Street and so on.

I went through and got home and my...

I lived about nine blocks north

of the World Trade Center.

I had my television, big screen television to my left,

and I had the big picture window.

When I saw the South Tower start to go down,

I had to look at the television to confirm what I was seeing out

my window with my own eyes.

It was unreal.

It was surreal.

It collapsed.

The top floors collapsed down.

I saw it blow and then ran like hell.

Thank God.

I'm 69, but I can still run.

You didn't know what the future would be.

It was so bad that you couldn't even

comprehend the enormity of it.

That's not the right word, I guess.

It was just...

Tribeca was one of those neighborhoods that

was sealed off, which meant no one was coming back

anytime soon, if ever.

Businesses closed

the streets emptied

people scattered.

The air was toxic.

And it would take years to understand

what it was doing to people.

It wasn't just the grief for the nearly 3,000 who died that day.

It was a rupture in the geography of the city.

People were afraid to come downtown.

Bob and I wanted to help.

We knew we had to do something.

It's crazy thinking it was 25 years ago.

The towers were in our neighborhood.

So at that moment, we were human beings

with hearts broken and our community torn apart,

and a huge hole in the ground left by terrorists.

What the hell could we do to fight back?

And what the hell could we do

to say we're still here.

Screw you.

And we're going to show you stories,

and we're going to do something. And we are loud and proud.

We just did it.

And I think.

More of us have to.

Do.

In 1989, Jane and I started the Tribeca Film Center

If you look left out of my office window,

you could see the towers.

They were always there, which means after a while,

you just stop noticing them.

And then one day, they were gone.

People needed to come together.

And that's what art does.

It unites us.

It pushes back against the things

that try to tear us apart.

When freedom is under such attack,

storytellers need to gather in response.

It's creating an environment where

people feel safe to tell their story, whatever their story is.

Attention, please.

New York Central railroad's 20th century.

I fell in love with New York to the movies,

and now New York needed the movies to recover.

The fuck are you smiling about.

To me, New York is the most cinematic city

in the world.

It can be romantic, gritty, lonely, desperate

or ready to explode.

The city's famous for the big stuff, the skyline, the bridges,

the landmarks everybody recognizes.

But I always thought the places that

got the least attention were the most interesting.

I'm walking here.

Well lit, George.

You hear that, New York?

We don't quit.

Now, how do you like that?

Two and a half miles is as wide as this cacophony gets.

You see the world through someone else's eyes

start to understand

how other people see things.

I'm as mad as hell.

Am I going to take this anymore.

And somewhere in there, your perspective shifts.

I personally figured I was watching something

that somebody else would never see again in the world.

But it was once in a lifetime.

And no matter what the city does to us,

we always come back to it.

I love this town.

The site selected for the Trade Center

was an old section of Manhattan's lower west side.

The area housed a great number of small businesses,

but the predominance of electronic stores doors

caused it to be known as Radio Row.

In 1966, the demolition began.

In all, 164 buildings had to be torn down

and generations of power, telephone, gas, steam, and water

lines had to be rerouted.

More than 250,000 people live here,

in the neighborhoods that surround the site

where the Twin Towers once stood.

This area is a ghost town, totally closed to the public.

There isn't even electricity in many of these buildings right now.

I wish things were normal just so we

didn't have to think about it.

I wish we could just go to a movie theater and watch movies,

but none are open, I wish, you know, it's hard.

It was devastation downtown

in terms of the restaurants and the businesses.

We had a lot of friends that worked as waiters

and people that ran clubs.

I mean, it was just terrible down there.

It was dying.

We started organizing these events called

dinner downtown.

I had this idea of inviting people

to come to these dinners.

My goal was have a meal, save a job.

They kept growing in size.

So you got a sign with four other celebrities

to go to a restaurant, and you're

going to have dinner in one restaurant

and then go to another place to have dessert.

It was like 30 teams or some crazy thing.

It put smiles on people's faces.

You can't underestimate the power of that.

Not only to rejuvenate the neighborhood,

but to lift people's spirits in a genuine way.

At one dinner downtown, there was this Con Ed worker

who had lost his son sitting next to me.

He said he felt like it was finally OK to leave the house

to do something besides mourn.

That was in November 2001.

Dozens of New York notables

are trying to jumpstart the tourism industry with a $40

million advertising campaign.

If it's not such a big deal, why don't you be the turkey?

-You want me to be the turkey? -Yeah, come on.

We were doing everything we could think of

to get New York to feel like New York again.

We thought, how do we give our community

something to look forward to?

Could we give our neighbors a new memory?

Bob and I talked about doing a film festival,

but this felt like the right time.

Tribeca Film Festival is a unique opportunity for people

to join together in the Downtown community to share their love for cinema.

And if anybody could do this, it's

Bob De Niro, and Jane Rosenthal.

I thought it was a great idea. They had a vision.

You don't go into a battle without having

a strategy or a plan. And they had that.

And I've seen a lot of things start and just crumbled.

This did not.

This is the time to do it.

It's very important for many reasons, many obvious reasons.

And so let's do it.

The festival was an act of defiance.

We had 120 days, 1,300 volunteers, no money,

no blueprint, just an idea in a neighborhood that needed people

back in it.

This wasn't just about movies.

It was about whether downtown was coming back.

Some of the toughest things

were figuring out what movie theaters we could go into.

We had to go in wearing Hazmat suits.

We had to get the city on board,

business leaders, politicians.

Mike Bloomberg showed up first just as a supporter,

then as the mayor.

Nobody slept much.

You looked out the window, it was still smoking.

That kept things in perspective.

Our city had been attacked.

It felt like this is what you had to do.

There was this mantra that we had,

whenever people would get upset about something

or complaining about something or whatever it was, we'd say,

look left.

That's what we're doing.

Trouble don't last always

We all know it won't last

Trouble don't last always

We weren't sure how

it would feel to go from a recovery operation

in Lower Manhattan to suddenly screening movies.

We invited Nelson Mandela to open the first festival.

It really gave us a way forward.

I know that your media will continue

to bring the world closer together, allowing

us to share in the lives and cultures of others.

I thank you.

Our goal was to celebrate the power of filmmaking,

but more importantly, to revitalize our neighborhood that

was devastated on September 11.

The mission of the Film Festival is simple,

to bring 50,000 people to Lower Manhattan over the next four

days, to use the power of filmmaking not only

to entertain, but also to rebuild our city.

We invite everyone to come and join us.

This neighborhood in particular is

even before September, was just being born,

and now it needs all this healing.

So I think it's a perfect thing they've done.

Now, the great thing about the movie business is that it draws crowds.

So when you have a film festival,

you're going to have people down in the neighborhood

and that's going to help all of the

restaurants and all of the smaller businesses.

We live down here.

I saw firsthand just how devastated the neighborhood was.

So when Jane and Bob called about the festival,

it was a no-brainer to jump in and do

whatever they asked me to do.

And that's what our community needed

to be in a room laughing and crying together.

That first year, it

was important to have a comedy because you wanted to laugh.

If you laughed, your endorphins come out

and then you feel better.

You just go.

OK. But I'll be back.

I'm really scared.

I've been to a lot of film festivals.

I love them and I believe in them.

And I've seen it firsthand time and time

again what a fabulous vitamin B12 injection to the buttock

they can be to any area, any city, any town.

Now, obviously, the neighbors really rejuvenated.

More people are walking up and down the street

than I've ever seen in months.

People seem to be having a good time, talking about movies

thinking about the neighborhood, which is really the whole point of it.

The thing that Bob and Jane really

did was to say to people, listen, yes, this happened.

We're not afraid.

Downtown will not just be revitalized,

but it will be reinvigorated.

Part of the responsibility that Bob and Jane took on

was saying, quite loudly, we are not

going to take this lying down.

We're going to bring downtown back.

I live downtown.

We had started work on a documentary about 9/11,

and I wanted Bob, who is the unofficial mayor of Tribeca,

to be the front person for it.

It's hard to weigh what happened on September 11.

But then he and Jane

came up with the idea of doing a film festival downtown.

And I don't know anybody who could say no to Bob De Niro.

Graydon Carter had

the idea of doing a Vanity Fair party at the courthouse.

And that's where the festival felt real, like,

oh my God, we've really done something.

Look, it's real.

At the event, if anybody

needed to know where the bathrooms were,

they'd ask any nearby billionaire

because the billionaires had all had trials in the building

and knew exactly where the men's rooms were.

In the Tribeca Film Festival, that

was the beginning of putting the city back together.

Now it's part of the cultural schedule of the city.

The festival started as a reaction to 9/11,

but it was also the birth of something very special.

What can we do to keep our neighborhood

alive and moving forward?

We all had different visions of cinema.

Jane had a vision.

Bob had a vision.

I had a vision.

Marty Scorsese was involved at the beginning.

In fact, Marty began supplying films

for retrospectives and the idea that a film festival

would be new films, but also classic films, silent films,

be all kinds of cinema.

This was part of what a film festival is supposed to be,

and what Tribeca became.

For me, this Manhattan is the universe,

and so everything I see is, and everything I react to,

is filtered through my experience in the city.

Bob you know that when we were downtown because we knew

each other I think we were 16.

Where did you hang out?

Two blocks South of where you were...

right where we shot, actually, at Kenmare Street,

Mulberry Street, that area.

No matter what the immigrant group is,

the immigrant experience, I think, it's

generally the same pattern of who are we in this country.

What are we?

It's a great experiment.

Will it continue?

Can we make it continue?

You've seen the pictures of me and Fellini and Sergio Leone.

Oh, my God, that's great.

My parents, at a certain point had

to be moved from Elizabeth Street

because they couldn't go up and down the stairs anymore.

So they got them an apartment in an elevator building.

Yeah, on Third Avenue?

On 13th Street and Third Avenue, remember?

The first time I visited the apartment Sergio was with me.

I said, this is a grand occasion

the first time you're visiting the apartment. And

my mother made all this food for him.

She liked him. She he was a very good eater.

But at that time, this place, the only excellent restaurant,

for example, in place was the Odeon.

Everything else was dead empty.

There was nothing here except the Odeon.

He stayed here for quite a while.

And as we did, it became more lively.

Places opened.

People started to move down here.

So the place started to come together.

I was here at the time of...

where it was just the very, very beginning

of the development of the place, put it that way,

where people actually started to be encouraged to come here

and also to create it.

When I first moved here,

and I would say I was living in Tribeca

and people would say to me, I thought you moved to New York.

And I'd say, I have moved to New York.

It's Tribeca.

It's the triangle below Canal Street.

If you look at a map of Lower Manhattan

in the early 1800s, this place was mostly open fields right

at the edge of the city.

The closeness to the water, the accessibility

of all the piers, the wholesale food market,

all those things drove Tribeca to become what it was.

And this area became a rather beautiful

little industrial village.

In the '70s, there was still a certain amount of industry,

but not enough to really keep

it going as artists began to be

priced out of Soho.

They trickled down below Canal Street

and into this industrial area that was weirdly off the radar.

There were very few people.

I mean, it was bleak.

If you think of Marty's film After Hours, it was like that.

But there was a lot of freedom.

And you can hang yourself with it, or you can find it to be liberating.

Tribeca became a place

where you could live and work in the same room,

where young families moved into former factories.

Like so much in New York, it wasn't designed that way.

It just worked.

The space that I remember, particularly during the day,

was all trucking.

Trucks everywhere. Then at night, it was dead.

Empty.

It was really good for stealing hubcaps or any kind of sex

that you wanted or drugs.

Nobody could see anything. I'm talking about before or after hours.

So Tribeca, all of a sudden, now is like the Elysian Fields.

I said, I knew guys used to steal hubcaps,

take cars from here.

Not that I did. I'm just saying.

In this corner of New York City, between the Wall

Street traders and the Soho Art Galleries,

De Niro is building a film community,

a place for ideas, talent and money

can get together outside of Hollywood.

When I saw this building, I said

it'd be nice to have a place that would have everything

like a restaurant, a screening room, especially this one, which

is a state of the art screening room.

Don't ask me all the details, but I know it is, where a lot of people

would be brought together in film.

Creative people who just by being together,

things would... ideas would come up

and projects and so on that we don't even

know what they would be.

I mean, the whole thing will take on a life of its own.

Jane and I started working together.

I saw this building and I thought, oh, gee, it'd

be great if we could do something.

It was my dream.

And we actually got it done.

I grew up in the village a few blocks North.

In the late '70s, I was looking around for gym space to train

for Raging Bull.

That's when I fell for the neighborhood.

The neighborhood was the mercantile and butter

and egg district.

This building was the former Martinson Coffee and Tetley

Tea building.

If you walked by this block, it really

did smell of coffee roasting.

If you walked a little further South,

you got to the Nutt district.

The whole point was

to build a place for independent film in New York.

People from LA always said New

York's a nice place to visit,

I wouldn't want to live there. Well, that was how it went for me.

LA is a nice place to visit. I wouldn't want to live there.

We want it to be down here.

It was more unique, special.

This building seemed perfect.

What we did is take a manufacturing

building that was actually for physical manufacturing

and turn it into a place of creating and manufacturing

stories and creativity.

The first festival was only four days.

And then we had to immediately start the second festival.

It is my pleasure to announce the second annual Tribeca

Film Festival will be returning to Lower Manhattan this spring.

Slowly, it began to craft a celebrity aura to it.

It went from this emotional 9/11 experience to becoming a very

valid festival.

Tribeca helped give respect to documentaries.

It became part of the business.

Find out who made it.

Find out what else they've done.

Here's a name you never heard of before.

Virunga it's a story about a British oil company that

was illegally exploring for oil within a national park.

There was a lot of people that didn't want this film

to see the light of day.

A year after the film launched at Tribeca,

SOCO international formally withdrew from the Virunga National Park.

And then people started talking about the film as an awards contender.

There's a contingent of filmmakers you know

will show up at Tribeca.

They're the cream of the crop of Film Festival talent.

Taxi to the Dark Side, it had the premiere at Tribeca,

went on to win the Oscars.

Just thought that this would be a helpful time for us all

to now that the first screenings are up to actually

look at it day by day.

Are we front loading things that we think are impactful?

Does every day have a good balance?

I think we've really

become a discovery festival.

It's the part of the job that I think is the most exciting

is that we could potentially be changing

someone's life, changing culture, putting fingerprints

on what the film culture in this country looks like.

Voice of the Rainbow, Mouthful of Gold, The Long Haul,

those are the ones I see on this list that could

go into a 250 to 350 size.

An iconoclast could fill one of those Sunday slots.

Hi. My name is Damien Chazelle.

I'm the writer and director of Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench

and this is my first Tribeca Film Festival.

One of my first years

we saw Damien Chazelle's first film, Guy and Madeline

on a Park Bench.

He's gone on to such incredible success since then.

Mind boggling.

There's a whole lot of filmmakers that have started here.

Ryan Coogler had his first short here, which was called Locks.

We chose writer director Nia DaCosta's Little Woods.

Nia DaCosta, she's

a wonderful filmmaker that has since completely blown up.

Oh, wow.

Winning something like that on your first film

is so impactful.

It makes people pay attention.

It's one of the things I really love about Tribeca

is that they genuinely are focused in expanding

the kinds of films that we get to see

and from different kinds of people.

My career was made there because that's where I sold my film,

and that really changed my trajectory.

We just kept doing what we set out to do,

finding new voices, new ways to tell

stories, different perspectives, people with something to say.

We'd like to present the Founders Award

for best narrative feature.

The winner will receive 25,000, as well as an art award valued at $50,000.

The art awards program is something

that Jane conceived of in the very early days

because we are a competitive festival.

Every year, approximately 10 artists

contribute original artwork from their collection or something

that they make for the festival, and it

serves as a filmmaker prize.

It's really one art form celebrating another.

Viable piece of art,

it's a nice thing to give to somebody.

It grows with them.

I never had a sense of community in my life.

To be a part of the Tribeca Film Festival,

and to be a part of what it did for other people,

I was very proud to be part of that.

-How's it going? -How are you doing?

When I first started at the festival,

most of the films we showed were on 35 or 16 millimeter.

When digital came along, that opened up

the ability to make films for so many more people.

The more people who are making films, stories that

are being told, the more different types of stories

you're going to get.

Part of what a festival does

is bring people together to watch all kinds of films

and have discussions afterwards and hear

what a filmmaker was thinking and engage

in some real interesting conversations.

That night, I was the happiest moment of my life.

Ladies and gentlemen, please give it up

for the director and cast of The Godfather and The Godfather Part two.

I've been asked by big shots, how

do you make a film that is successful financially and also

artistically?

And I said to him, risk.

Michael, Michael.

Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the 25th Tribeca festival.

It's hard to believe that it's been half a century

since the brilliant Martin Scorsese delivered us

Taxi Driver, starring our very own Robert De Niro.

They are joined here tonight by other incredible artists

at the heart of Taxi Driver, Jodie Foster and Paul Schrader.

Jody was only 12 years old when she starred in Taxi

Driver and Paul, the extraordinary screenwriter

who brought Taxi Driver to life in a singular

force of American cinema.

Please join me in welcoming Martin Scorsese, Robert De

Niro, Jodie Foster, Paul Schrader, and W. Kamau Bell.

Taxi Driver is about a disaffected young man

who has problems connecting romantically

with women and hyperfocuses on politicians in the wrong ways

and wants to be the hero in his own story.

Why do you think this is relevant today?

There's something absolutely 100% true

and authentic about the character's disaffection and

loneliness that I didn't really understand but that I knew was really true.

Mr. Scorsese, what do you think?

Why is this film endured?

When I saw the cab, I began to realize

that it's that arc of despair.

New York in the summer has got great steam.

The steam comes up and the cab came through.

I said, oh my God, look at that. And somebody said, oh, it's supposed

to be the hell metaphor. I wasn't making a metaphor.

It's the cab coming through the steam.

Really it was.

Can we spare some words for that era of New York City,

and what it was like to film in that era?

There was something in the shoot of the film,

and you could feel in the temperature,

you could feel a violence all around you,

and you could taste it in a way.

And it was the city.

It was falling apart.

Really was falling apart.

I was sitting there in the village saying,

this is the greatest fucking place on Earth.

It really was.

So I'm not going to be able to leave here alive if I

don't ask about one scene in particular from Taxi Driver.

Do you remember?

I think so.

Would you happen to remember what the famous line from that scene is?

Yes, I know it.

Are you talking to me?

I'll add one more thing.

I'm the only one here.

That's the point.

That was the point. You're right.

It didn't matter how much we expanded or grew.

We never forgot where we came from.

You're opening up the festival this year

with a movie, United 93, which, of course, tells

the story of the flight that crashed in Pennsylvania.

You couldn't think of not opening

the festival with the movie, let's put it that way.

We invited all the families

to come to the festival.

They never felt part of the national grief.

That was for the Pentagon.

It was for New York.

They didn't talk about United 93.

This is a movie to see, to be strong, to be strong.

Not to be afraid of nobody.

There were sobs in that theater.

It was people grieving.

We were there for each other.

Collectively, singularly.

Harkens back to why we built the festival in the first place.

Tribeca is not actually a triangle.

It's a quadrilateral that speaks to exactly what Tribeca is.

It's just little tilted, a little quirky, a little

surprising, unexpected.

It isn't just borders on a map.

It's a feeling.

It's a vibe.

At the heart, we are about a community, and bringing people together.

And there's nothing like a New York audience

because it's as diverse as every point of view that can exist in the world.

It's here in New York.

I feel like we're an audience festival.

First festival, it

was about how many people we could bring downtown.

That first year, David Bowie played.

How you doing.

Having a good time?

Music became part of the festival going

forward because it was a way to celebrate,

and we needed to start to feel good again.

Elton John performed,

and he played your song and dedicated it to New York City.

This one's for you with my love.

And now we have Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus coming.

And we had Nas come with his Time Is Illmatic film.

Nas is New York.

Hip hop is New York.

Opening the Tribeca Film Festival,

Robert De Niro comes out and introduces the film.

This film tells the story of the making of an artist

and the making of an album here in our hometown.

It was a surreal moment, to say the least.

I want to thank Robert De Niro.

He plays me in all his movies.

Artists in the city were born with this obligation

to represent New York.

You have to express it in your art.

I love you guys.

Governor Cuomo just announced the first confirmed

case in New York City.

The number of cases has climbed to 5,000.

Coronavirus crisis in the nation's largest city

is exploding.

Bars, restaurants, entertainment venues shut down

in an attempt to slow the rapidly spreading virus.

In March of 2020, everything stopped.

New York shut down almost overnight.

Theaters went dark, streets were empty.

We were one of the first festivals that

had to pause during COVID.

I was struck by the fact that we started the festival

to bring people together.

In COVID, we couldn't touch each other.

Tribeca is now helping New

York rejuvenate post-COVID.

We've been through a grueling year, and it's been devastating, frustrating,

at times frightening.

Today, we're thrilled to be able to bring the Tribeca Film

Festival to all five boroughs as a tribute

to storytelling and cultural richness of every part of New York.

Tribeca will be the first in-person film festival

to take place in all of North America since the pandemic began over a year ago.

Well, first of all, congratulations.

Thank you. Thank you so much.

Jon Chu had one of his early short films here at Tribeca.

This is where we started.

When we came here for the first time,

we were wide-eyed and innocent within the heights being there.

It couldn't have been more full circle for us.

We were back, and it was this community

in Washington Heights where we premiered it,

where we shot the movie.

So to come back there after being locked down

to be outside just felt like a return to not just home,

but to normalcy.

It was like breathing air again.

You just saw people come back and just

for an hour or two, they were able to forget everything going on in the world

and in their lives.

We brought them entertainment.

That was originally what Tribeca was all about.

It was amazing to see just New Yorkers being New Yorkers again.

Film has the ability

to take people out of the world they live in

and show them other things.

That's, for me, the beauty of the arts.

You are able to share.

This is what I think and this is who I am.

What am I doing?

I never come downtown?

I hate downtown.

Artists reveal certain truths that some people are afraid to face, and

that's why they're artists.

At the end of the day, artists are just trying to point out what's going on.

Art is inclusive.

It brings people together, like tonight.

Art looks for truth, art embraces diversity.

And that's why art is a threat.

That's why we are a threat to autocrats and fascists.

And this isn't just an American problem, it's a global one.

Unlike a film, we can't just all sit back and watch.

We have to act, and we have to act now.

Another suspected explosive was found in the mail.

That package sent to the Tribeca offices of actor Robert De Niro.

Bob is really fearless in what

he's willing to take on.

I feel betrayed by my country.

It doesn't have to be perfect, but it does need to return to the

values that gave us our strength, and humanity.

I'm particularly proud of him and his voice as

an independent, free person, speaking about the situation that we're living in.

Someone like Bob, when he uses his words,

can bring people's attention to certain issues.

You're always about lifting up everybody around you?

-Yeah, of course. -Why is that?

You have to.

You have to lift people up.

Why?

You have to bring them together. Period.

You can't divide people.

You can't win that way.

It's a no win situation.

We give out an award that the late Paula Weinstein started

in honor of Harry Belafonte for artists and activism.

Artists are the gatekeepers of truth.

This year, we're giving Belafonte Award to Bruce Springsteen.

He's not afraid to fight back with his words, his music,

and about what's been going on in this country.

This past winter, federal troops

brought death and terror to the streets of Minneapolis.

Bruce is exactly the right person to write that lament,

"Streets of Minneapolis," right at the moment when we all needed to hear.

Through the winter's ice and cold

America tells its story in cinema.

Cinema is where the American dream was

encoded before it was exported.

And what followed?

American music.

Johnny Cash was America, Aretha Franklin was America,

Harry Belafonte was America.

Bruce Springsteen is America.

Some songs managed to change, not just the room

that they recorded in, or they can change

the atmosphere of a time.

And we know how serious you feel,

what you're feeling for your country.

I always work for me inside out.

So you're sitting around, and I'm just pissed off.

And if you... art has the chance to shape culture.

Culture shapes politics.

Culture and politics shape the nation.

And that's the business we're in.

Bruce Springsteen.

As if you didn't know.

If you look through history, the town is destroyed.

People leave it.

They'll go to another place.

They didn't leave.

Instead, put back in and resurrected,

really the spirit of the city.

We had done a film, Gangs of New York at the time,

and the draft riots took place right here.

And that was one of the worst riots in American history.

So these cataclysms occur.

But it didn't stop the evolution.

Tribeca has become

a festival you have to be thinking about in the festival

world, wherever you are.

There's an energy downtown.

It's things going on in the streets.

It was a celebration,

and it really said life goes on.

And it really said film is important.

It's like Coney Island for the soul.

That's what the festival is.

And for me, it's always shiny that way.

It's super important to have these film festivals, where

people can actually commune, communicate,

and have a dialogue.

That's what it's about really.

At film festivals, you're not arguing,

you're listening.

And I think listening is becoming a lost skill.

The pillars that we've put in place

in terms of artists and activism,

hopefully that's something that can bring people together

for another 25 years.

There are so many of our new colleagues here that

don't remember 9/11.

Some of you weren't even born on 9/11, 2001.

I want to invite all of you to the 9/11 Museum and Memorial.

We'll have a tour.

I've been a part of the museum since the beginning.

And I'm excited about showing it to you.

Two square memorial pools, the waterfalls, right?

That's where the towers once stood.

This is foundation hall, and foundation hall

is an archeological site.

So that wall has a lot of importance.

The slurry wall served as a symbol of resilience after

the 9/11 attacks.

We're going through the story of 9/11,

but just as important is also what happened on 9/12.

People came together.

You suddenly got to know who your neighbors were.

That brought the festival together

and the community together.

New Yorkers and the rest of this country

proved that it wasn't about rebuilding the steel and glass.

It was about showing the world what we represent,

that we're here for each other and that we will continue

to go on no matter what.

Patti Smith.

There were desserts

I saw the fountains

And like cream

The waters rise

And we strolled there together

We learned to laugh or criticize

I was dreaming

In my dreaming

God knows a pure view

As I surrender into my sleeping

I commit

My dream to you

Come on

People have the power

To dream

People have the power

To vote

People have the power

To match

People have the power

To love

Power to dream

To rule

To wrestle the world from fools

It's decreed

The people rule

Well, it's decreed

The people rule

Listen,

I believe everything we dream

Can come to pass through our union

We can turn the world around

We can turn the Earth's revolution

We have the power

People have the power

Don't forget it

Use your voice.