From NYC Lisbon Tribeca Fest Mission Bridge Transatlantic Divide

The Tribeca Film Festival, originally an effort to unite New York City after the 9/11 attacks, is bringing its healing ways — and select indie movies from its 2025 festival — to Tribeca Festival Lisboa’s second edition amid a widening transatlantic rift between the U.S. and Europe.

“I was thinking how can we in the spirit of collaboration — which this festival came out of, where we’re shaking hands between Tribeca, New York and Lisbon — represent that collaboration.” Cara Cusumano, Festival Director and senior vp of programming at Tribeca, tells The Hollywood Reporter ahead of the Tribeca Festival Lisboa’s second edition getting underway for an Oct. 29 to Nov. 1 run in Lisbon, Portugal.

The result is a mission of partnership between American and Portuguese artists and filmmakers taking cinema in new directions to build bridges between indie film on both sides of the Atlantic.

“Film is a way, and increasingly feels like the only way, you can truly empathize with a different points of view or experience the world in a different way you have experienced it. Some of these films are doing that very explicitly,” Cusumano insists.

This year’s Tribeca Festival Lisboa’s movie slate includes American film ambassadors having made films in Europe, or tackled European stories or history, as with Julian Schnabel’s In the Hand of Dante, which is based on a novel centered around Dante’s Divine Comedy, or James Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg, a film about post-war Germany shot in Hungary.

Schnabel, whose latest film will open the 2025 Tribeca Festival Lisboa, in a statement to THR talked up Tribeca using prestige cinemas as a cultural outreach: “It’s vital that we share art and ideas across cultures and countries, which is why I’m especially pleased that my film will play to a Portuguese audience and that in turn this festival will provide a spotlight for the best of Portuguese cinema.”

Then there’s European directors having made movies in the U.S., like Yorgo Lanthimos’ genre-bending Bugonia, “which is really grappling with this moment we find ourselves in here,” she adds. And there’s a hybrid with Lilian T. Mehrel’s Honeyjoon, a U.S.-Portugal co-production by an American director shot and set in the Azores.

Her dark comedy about a mother and daughter’s grief journey bowed at Tribeca in June 2025 after a year earlier earning the 2024 Untold Stories Award at the script stage, and will now make its Portuguese premiere at Tribeca Lisboa. “(Honeyjoon) just tells a really beautiful story about how America and Portugal, New York and Lisbon, can work in partnership to make these films and get them seen by the widest audience possible,” Cusumano adds.

Tribeca Festival Lisboa will also follow the lead of the inaugural edition last year in bringing selections from the 2025 Tribeca Festival for European premieres.

That includes Libby Ewing’s Charliebird, which earned the best U.S. narrative feature at Tribeca; Alberto Arvelo’s All We Cannot See; Michael J. Weithorn’s dramedy The Best You Can; and Steven Feinartz’s feature documentary Are We Good?, about the highs and lows of Marc Maron’s comedy career and working through his grief over the unexpected death of longtime romantic partner Lynn Shelton.

Feinartz tells THR he hopes his documentary screening in Lisbon brings a higher profile for Europe for Maron, an established comedic talent less known outside the U.S.

“I just think grief is a universal concept and something we all deal with. Marc Maron may not be as known over Europe. So this is a character study of somebody who brings a different angle to the idea of grief and mourning. And I think that will help other people, Europeans as well as everybody around the world,” Feinartz argues.

And in the spirit of cultural exchange and collaboration, Cusumano points to Tribeca Festival Lisboa’s picks for local Portuguese cinema, including Duarte Neves’ feature debut, Match, about an ageing actor seeking refuge in Lisbon’s dating scene via Tinder; Antonio Ferreira’s A Memoria do Cheiro das Coisas, an intimate drama about a colonial war veteran drama and his black caregiver; and Fernando Vendrell’s Além do Horizonte – A Travessia, a drama about pioneering Portuguese aviators.

“It wouldn’t feel organic if it’s just us coming into another country and bringing films from Tribeca and popping up. It has to feel like it’s coming from the artistic community and the filmmaking community that is living and working and attending movies there too,” Cusumano explains.

To that end, panels at Tribeca Festival Lisboa will feature American and Portuguese participants in conversation on the same stage, as with Portuguese actor Albano Jerónimo talking about bringing characters to life on screen alongside Hollywood veterans Edie Falco and Giancarlo Esposito.

“Our hope for the dialogue is we can do all these things together and put some of the talent we’re bringing literally in conversation on stage with some of their contemporaries in Portugal, and see what interesting things come out of that,” Cusumano says.

The Tribeca Talks series in Lisbon will also feature Kim Cattrall, Meg Ryan and Piper Perabo alongside Portuguese artists and filmmakers like Ricardo Araújo Pereira, Claudia Vieira and Augusto Fraga.

“At a time when the world can feel increasingly divided, storytelling has the power to connect us across cultures, geographies and generations. Tribeca Festival Lisboa is more than a showcase of films — it’s an act of cultural diplomacy, a celebration of how art can foster dialogue and deepen our understanding of one another,” Jane Rosenthal, co-founder and CEO of Tribeca Enterprises, added in a statement.