Tribeca Enterprises and YouTube have teamed up to unveil the lineup for We Are One: A Global Film Festival which both platforms hope to lift up spirits in the film community amidst the pandemic closing down major annual festivals.
We Are One is a 10 day film festival online and will be launching on May 29-June 7 exclusively on Youtube for free. The festival will feature over 100 films co-curated by 21 of the most renowned festivals, including Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Sundance, Toronto, BFI London, along with Tribeca, amongst others.
The festival will provide COVID-19 relief through donations to the World Health Organization (WHO), UNICEF, UNHCR, Save the Children, Doctors Without Borders, Leket Israel, GO Foundation and Give2Asia, among others. Audiences will be able to donate via a link on every film page.
The films will range from new projects making their debut online, to previous gems from past festivals. And because the festival is strongly emphasized as international, the event will provide a look into different cultures from all over the world, hosting films that represent over 35 countries. The mix includes 8 documentary features, 57 narratives, 15 documentary short films, 15 archived talks, 4 festival exclusives and 5 VR programming pieces. Overall, the festival will hold 13 world premieres, 31 online premieres and 5 international online premieres.
The virtual talks will host different kinds of brilliant minds and actors, including Francis Ford Coppola, Bong Joon Ho and Song Kang Ho, Steven Soderbergh, Guillermo del Toro, Jane Campion, and Claire Denis.
The festival will include the world premiere of Ricky Powell: The Individualist, which is about the titular legendary street photographer, LL Cool J.’s satire Eeb Allay Ooo! which centers around New Delhi’s professional “monkey repellers” and had won Mumbai Film Festival’s Golden Gateway Award. Joan Chen will present the world premiere of Iron Hammer, a documentary centering around Chinese Olympic volleyball star Jenny Lang Ping.
Former festival titles in this year’s program include Cherien Dabis’ Amreeka which won the Fipresci critics honor in Cannes in 2009, and David R. Romay’s thriller Beyond The Mountain, winner of the 2018 Guadalajara fest. Documentary shorts include the world premiere of Koji Fukada’s Japanese narrative short Yalta Conference Online, and the first shorts made by Dreamworks Animation: Bilby, Marooned and Bird Karma.
360 VR selections will feature Emmy-nominated documentary Traveling While Black and sci-fi narrative Atlas V starring Bill Skarsgard. Other titles feature John Legend, Oprah Winfrey and Lupita Nyong’o. Musical performances are also included into the program.
Episodic programming features the world premiere of Losing Alice, an Israeli female-led neo-noir psychological TV thriller, and two-part documentary series And She Could Be Next that revolves around the experiences of women of color running for office.
Here is the link to the full festival schedule.