Tribeca Film Festival: 9 Filmmakers Who Should Be on Your Radar

In Danny Boyle’s “Yesterday,” the closing-night feature at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, a musician awakes to a world in which no one else has ever heard of the Beatles. While it’s unlikely in the extreme that the festival, which opened Wednesday, will produce an artist as enduring as the Beatles, talented filmmakers can go overlooked in so large an event. Several dozen selections are both world premieres and feature debuts, which means they offer an opportunity to get in on the ground floor with a potentially major new director. Here are nine highlights from that group.

‘Burning Cane’

At 19, Phillip Youmans is surely the youngest director in this year’s American dramatic competition, and probably the most experimental. Claiming inspiration from the blues, he tells his story in an elliptical style that looks a lot like recent-vintage Terrence Malick. The film teems with lived-in details from its rural Louisiana setting (like the lengthy discussion of how to cure a dog of mange in the film’s opening) and springs to life whenever Wendell Pierce is onscreen as an alcoholic preacher. The movie is tough going, but coming from a 19-year-old, it shows a startlingly expansive understanding of what movies can be.

‘CRSHD’

Your mileage may vary on the visual barrage of Facebook and emoji jokes and the use of words like “obvi” in dialogue, but the aggressive Generation Z trappings don’t make writer-director Emily Cohn’s college raunch-com any less winning or sweet. With her studies for a looming astronomy exam on the back burner, Izzy (Isabelle Barbier), a college freshman, prepares to attend a “crush party” — all guests have been invited anonymously by a crush — and lose her virginity. Barbier is very funny, as are Deeksha Ketkar and Sadie Scott as Izzy’s cohorts.

‘Lucky Grandma’

Sasie Sealy’s dark comedy — partly financed by the festival through an inclusion initiative — revives a strain of 1980s after-hours madcap. The veteran Chinese-born actress Tsai Chin plays the grandma in question, who, on the bus back to New York from a casino, discovers she’s sitting next to a dead man who was traveling with a pile of cash. Others soon try to claim it. Going right up to the edge of stereotypes — it turns out the woman’s stubbornness serves her well in the Chinatown underworld — “Lucky Grandma” and Tsai pull off a tricky balancing act of tone. Corey Ha steals scenes as Grandma’s kindhearted (and very large) bodyguard.

‘Noah Land’

Cenk Erturk’s Turkish-language feature has the sort of delicate ambiguity we associated with the films of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. The ailing Ibrahim (Haluk Bilginer, from the Palme d’Or-winning “Winter Sleep”), accompanied by his son (Ali Atay), travels to the village where he grew up, hoping to be buried under a tree he says he planted as a child. But pilgrims believe that Noah planted the tree, and another family has tended it for 50 years. Is Ibrahim mistaken about the location? Could he have other motives? Erturk uses this situation to illuminate the father-son relationship.

‘Red, White & Wasted’

“The Florida Project” captured one kind of poverty in the shadow of Disney World; “Red White & Wasted” depicts another. Embedding in a culture where the term “redneck” is used proudly, the documentary follows the family of Matthew Burns, who, with the nickname Video Pat, was a tireless chronicler of the off-road revelry at an Orlando-area mudhole — a site where locals would drive their trucks through the muck and engage in gone-wild-style partying. The directors, Andrei Bowden Schwartz and Sam B. Jones, follow Burns and his daughters through a period of transition, including an unexpected pregnancy and certain evolving attitudes. (This is a movie in which people say things like, “I’m not fully racist. I’m not racist at all, really.”) The result is an oddly poignant portrait of family and of the wisdom that comes with aging.

‘Scheme Birds’

Credited with their own cinematography and sound, Swedish directors Ellen Fiske and Ellinor Hallin take a frank look at life in a Scottish housing project. After a pregnancy causes a rift with the grandfather who raised her, Gemma begins settling down with the boyfriend he disapproves of, Pat. The filmmakers capture changes both abrupt (one of Gemma’s friends is the victim of a sudden act of violence) and slow-simmering (as Gemma’s relationship with Pat disintegrates) and emerge with a heartening portrait of resilience in a setting where parental abandonment and prison time are treated as regular facts of life.

‘See You Yesterday’

Stefon Bristol’s movie, based on a previous short, tips its hat to other time-travel films (Michael J. Fox appears briefly as a teacher at Bronx Science). But with an ideal balance of matinee zip and social critique, it finds a fresh angle on the genre. Eden Duncan-Smith and Dante Crichlow star as two teenagers in Brooklyn who invent an apparatus that allows them to take short hops back in time, for 10-minute intervals. They soon find themselves using those powers to prevent an unjustified shooting by police. Produced by Spike Lee, the film will be available on Netflix next month.

‘17 Blocks’

This one’s a bit of a cheat: It’s the first feature as a solo director by the “This American Life” contributor Davy Rothbart, but he and Andrew Cohn won a News and Documentary Emmy in 2015 for another film, “Medora.” This latest movie, a chronicle of a family in Washington — the title refers to the distance from their home to the Capitol — began filming far earlier, in 1999. It covers two decades of hardship and heartbreak, and includes unshakable scenes of violence and redemption.

‘You Don’t Nomi’

Misunderstood by critics, audiences and perhaps even certain people who made it, “Showgirls” (1995) continues its journey toward full reclamation with this pleasingly wonkish, clip-heavy deconstruction from Jeffrey McHale. Even “Showgirls” partisans see the film in different lights: It’s portrayed as grist for drag shows and bad-movie nights; as the inspiration for a book of sestinas; and as a sophisticated satire whose craft and layered meanings have been revealed over time. Elizabeth Berkley’s performance in particular is singled out as an unfairly maligned tour de force.

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Tribeca Film Festival

Through May 5 at locations around the city; tribecafilm.com.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.