At the Tribeca Festival, Standouts Come From Near and Far

“You have to be used to change in New York,” Matthew Broderick remarks in “Raoul’s, a New York Story,” a documentary highlight of this year’s Tribeca Festival. The film centers on the celebrated French bistro, which opened in Soho in 1975 amid a cultural renaissance and became a fixture for local artists. Since then, survival of the richest has all but erased la vie bohème from the neighborhood in favor of a catwalk of retail storefronts — though Raoul’s is still standing, its arty interior nearly unmodified.

To Broderick, that’s just life in the city. “Everything we hold incredibly dear,” he says in an interview in the film, “took over for something that somebody else held dear.”

His remarks could very well be a slogan for the Tribeca Festival. Its obsession with novelty has, in recent years, made it an almost manically multifarious affair. Alongside movies, this year’s edition — which runs Wednesday through June 15 — will host video games, audio storytelling and an immersive program stamped with a catalog of acronyms: A.R., V.R., A.I. While festivals like Cannes are steeped in tradition, Tribeca is eager to be seen as a celebration of transformation, a festival of the future.

The zeal with which Tribeca pushes forward can feel exciting, but like an overactive online shopper, it also generates clutter. It’s hard to find the gems. Sampling this year’s lineup, I found that the most memorable world premieres sorted into two subsets: the near and the far. International standouts come from Korea, India and Chile — a long way from the Triangle Below Canal Street. Then there are the local discoveries, capturing a New York spirit that aligns with the festival’s setting.

Straddling both categories is “Raoul’s,” which tells the story of the Soho canteen by tracing its origins to Alsace, France, and then chronicling the Raoul men’s travels in Bali, Indonesia. The documentary was shot over a decade by Greg Olliver alongside Karim Raoul, who took over the restaurant’s day-to-day operations after his father, the founder Serge Raoul, suffered a stroke. As such, the film is as much a portrait of a local institution as it is a tale of a father and a son, exploring notions of legacy, heritage and what it means to sideline personal dreams for family obligations.