Cara Cusumano, Director of Programming for the Tribeca Festival, joins Past Present Feature as the festival celebrates its 25th year. She pulls back the curtain on how one of the world's premier film festivals selects its films, and how curation, audience, and timing shape every lineup. Along the way, Cara reflects on the films and filmmakers that shaped her own cinematic taste, from F for Fake, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, to the fiction work of David Fincher, Agnès Varda, and Steven Sp...

Daniel Blake Schwartz breaks down how Tribeca Best U.S. Narrative Feature winner Cotton Fever grew out of years spent collecting stories during his own experience with addiction and recovery, ultimately transforming those fragments into a deeply personal debut feature. Drawing inspiration from filmmakers like Andrea Arnold and Hirokazu Kore-eda, Schwartz pursued a style rooted in realism, empathy, and lived experience rather than conventional dramatic structure. The film evolved from a self-f...

Alan D’Escragnolle breaks down how his company Filmhub is rethinking distribution, shifting away from gatekeeping toward flexible, film-specific strategies. Instead of a single path, films are matched with what they actually need, whether that’s AVOD, SVOD, or a more hands-on sales and marketing push. The bigger shift is economic. With hundreds of thousands of titles entering the market each year, access is easier than ever, but monetization is harder. Success now comes down to positioning, a...

Tawfik Sabouni breaks down his Berlinale-bound documentary Other Side of the Sun and how it grew out of lived experience, from filming protests during the Syrian revolution to imprisonment, exile, and ultimately shaping that reality into his first feature. He doesn’t separate fiction and nonfiction, approaching cinema as one language built around truth and urgency. The film follows survivors returning to the prison where they were held, using reenactment to access memory rather than spectacle...

Charlie Tyrell breaks down how The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, this years SXSW Audience Award winner now in theaters from Focus Features, turns an overwhelming, abstract subject into something personal by grounding it in fatherhood. Instead of approaching AI through pure information or fear, the film frames it through the lens of bringing a child into the world, making the stakes immediate, emotional, and human. Co-directed by Daniel Roher, Academy Award winning director of Nav...

Belgian filmmaker Frederike Migom breaks down her Berlinale premiere Everyone’s Sorry Nowadays, a coming-of-age story set almost entirely inside a single home and a young girl’s mind. The film explores identity through a tightly contained structure, blending realism with imagined sequences that bring the character’s inner world to life. She talks through her unconventional path into directing, from acting and production work to navigating Europe’s state-funded film system. A key turning point...

Jeremy Workman discusses Secret Mall Apartment, his Netflix documentary about a group of Rhode Island artists who secretly built and lived in an apartment inside a busy shopping mall, filming the entire four-year experiment themselves. After a strong self-released theatrical run, the film is now streaming on Netflix. Jeremy traces the project back to a chance meeting in Athens, where he connected with the main subject and slowly earned the trust of the full group after years of other filmmake...

Gille Klabin discusses Weekend at the End of the World, his follow-up to The Wave, and the deliberate choice to build a second feature that didn’t require waiting for studio permission. Shot in 12 days on a sub-$300K budget, the film was designed around creative, logistical, and financial control. Gille reflects on the lessons he learned from The Wave’s release, where traditional distribution left him frustrated by opaque marketing spends and limited transparency, and how that experience resh...

Sharon Liese joins the show after premiering Seized at Sundance to unpack the story behind the Marion, Kansas newspaper raid that ignited a national debate around press freedom, abuse of power, and the fragility of the First Amendment. What begins as an egregious police search of a small-town newsroom expands into a layered portrait of community tension, history, ego, and how something unthinkable can happen in a place that looks quiet on the surface. The film moves beyond headlines into char...

Gabby Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman join the show after winning Sundance’s Grand Jury Prize to unpack the ten-year road behind Nuisance Bear, a polar bear’s journey through two connected worlds: tourist-heavy Churchill, Manitoba, and the Inuit community of Arviat, where the stakes are far more complex and far less welcoming. The film becomes a meditation on coexistence, control, and who gets labeled a “nuisance” in a shared landscape. We dig into craft and access: finding the right position fo...