Alternative Film Guide

This year’s edition of New York’s Tribeca Film Festival did not shy away from potentially controversial films. For starters, Li Shaohong’s Sheng Si Jie / Stolen Life, a Chinese drama that has reportedly been banned in its country of origin, won Best Film honors.

Shaohong hopes that the publicity surrounding Stolen Life’s Tribeca win will help get the film "green-lighted so my people in China can watch [it] soon." Stolen Life depicts the hardships of a young Chinese woman who struggles to eke out a living doing menial work after having dropped out of college because of her untrustworthy lover.

Felicity Huffman, one of the stars of the American TV hit series Desperate Housewives, won the best actress prize for her portrayal of a Born-Again Christian who also happens to be a pre-operative (male-to-female) transsexual in Duncan Tucker’s Transamerica. Actor William H. Macy, Huffman’s husband and the film’s executive producer, accepted the award in her place.

Dutch actor Cees Geel won the best actor award for his role as a man who, facing imminent death, must take responsibility for his future — or lack thereof — in Eddy Terstall’s Simon, the Netherlands’s official submission for the 2004 Best Foreign-Language Film Academy Award.

Péter Forgács’s El Perro Negro: Stories from the Spanish Civil War, a Dutch-Hungarian production covering the travails of a Catalan industrialist family during Spain’s bloody 1930s, was chosen the best documentary feature. Director Forgács has explained that his film attempts to show that there were villainous murderers on all sides of that conflict, which left in its wake between 600,000 and 1 million dead.

More than 250 films from 45 countries were shown at Tribeca. Judges included actress Whoopi Goldberg, author Tom Wolfe, and pop personality Sheryl Crow.

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