With Pleasantville as his Classroom, Filmmaker Michael Bloom Debuts Movie at Tribeca Film Fest

Michael Bloom was a sophomore at Pleasantville High School when he accidentally walked into the wrong movie at the local Burns Film Center. He had bought a ticket for a Hollywood studio film with friends, but they wandered into Phoenix—a slow, arthouse German film he never would have chosen. Against his own preconceptions, he was completely enraptured. From that moment, the Burns became his classroom, and he spent every weekend there, using $20 from babysitting to buy an $8 falafel and a $12 movie ticket. That serendipitous wrong turn set him on a path that, years later, led his short film Rare Birds into the Tribeca Film Festival.

The Reality of Getting Into Tribeca

Bloom and his collaborator Lily Weisberg are careful not to romanticize the process. Rare Birds was selected from over 9,000 short film submissions—only 86 made the cut. But both filmmakers insist that getting in is not simply a matter of making the "best" film. "It's not the movies that are the best that get into these festivals necessarily," Weisberg says. "These movies are programmed by people who are watching them. And so you're sort of at the whims of the programmers and their taste." She describes it as a matter of luck: your movie ending up in front of a person at Tribeca who happens to resonate with it, when it could just as easily have landed with someone who didn't connect.