This year, the Tribeca Film Festival will debut the inaugural Tribeca Celebrates Pride, a day-long event on Saturday, May 4th at the Tribeca Festival Hub at Spring Studios concluding with the World Premiere of Wig, directed by Chris Moukarbel. The day will honor the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, including one-on-one interviews with LGBTQ+ luminaries including Neil Patrick Harris, John Cameron Mitchell, Larry Kramer and guest speaker Asia Kate Dillon. The program will reflect on the impact of this seminal moment for the LGBTQ+ community and include conversations with Raul Castillo, Patti Harrison, Angelica Ross, and more.
Additionally, the event will shine a light on the LGBTQ+ experience through a carefully curated program of seven short films, all of which are playing in competition at the Festival. Notable talent featured in these shorts include Angelica Ross (Pose), Brianna Hildebrand (Deadpool) and Zackary Drucker (Transparent).
The Tribeca Celebrates Pride day event will conclude with the world premiere of HBO Documentary Films’ Wig, which spotlights the art of drag, and centers on the annual New York festival, Wigstock. The film showcases the personalities and performances that inform the ways we understand queerness, art and identity today. Following the premiere, audiences will be treated to a live drag show hosted by the founder of Wigstock, Lady Bunny.
Shorts Program Pride: Front and Center
Standing tall with these short films that celebrate Pride, this carefully curated program contains both narrative and documentary shorts, and poignantly explores LGBTQ+ life with humor, panache, kindness and compassion. Featuring Angelica Ross (Pose), Brianna Hildebrand (Deadpool) and Zackary Drucker (Transparent), prepare for a cross-cultural odyssey that ends, fittingly, with the safe queer haven of Christopher Street Pier. Curated by Tribeca Film Festival Shorts Programmers Sharon Badal and Ben Thompson. Featured shorts are: I Think She Likes You, Momster, Ponyboi, Black Hat, Carlito Leaves Forever, Framing Agnes and Stanley Stellar: Here For This Reason.
World Premiere of Wig
Wig, directed by Chris Moukarbel. Produced by Jack Turner, Bruce Cohen, David Burtka, Neil Patrick Harris, Jason Weinberg, Jay Peterson, Michael Mayer, Todd Lubin. (USA) – World Premiere, Feature Documentary. Wigstock was an annual drag festival, which glamorously signaled the end of summer for the gay community in NYC for almost twenty years. Late one night in 1984, Lady Bunny and a few friends drunkenly wandered from the Pyramid Club in the East Village to Tompkins Square Park and staged an impromptu drag show in the bandshell. This would soon become an annual drag bacchanal, that lasted up until 2001. And now, Lady Bunny has brought it back. This past summer, the festival returned, bringing together legendary queens with some of the new children of drag, into one of the largest drag performances ever staged.
Wig explores the origins and the influence of the historic festival through rich archival footage, as well as provides a look into the contemporary drag movement that the festival served as a foundation for. It’s a celebration of New York drag culture, and those personalities and performances that contribute to the ways we understand queerness, art, and identity today. With Lady Bunny, Charlene Incarnate, Flotilla DeBarge, Kevin Aviance, Neil Patrick Harris, Willam, Linda Simpson, Naomi Smalls, Tabboo! HBO Documentary Films