Questlove, Earth, Wind & Fire Electrify Tribeca Festival Opening Night, Founders Reflect On 25th Anniversary – “It Just Kept Rolling And Rolling, And Here We Are”

The 25^th Tribeca Festival sprang to life Wednesday night with the world premiere of Oscar and Grammy- winning Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s feature documentary on Earth, Wind & Fire. The legendary band played a short but boisterous set after with The Roots drummer joining.

In opening remarks, Robert De Niro slammed the nation’s “monstrous” government. “We’ve always recognized the power of storytelling” to bring us together, said the fest co-founder and activist, despite “immoral, cruel” leaders who “are trying to force us apart … We’re not going to let that happen. Are we?” Massive cheers in response.

His partner, Tribeca Enterprises executive chair Jane Rosenthal, nodded to game one of the NBA finals, setting off an ear splitting “Go Knicks!!! chant that shook the Beacon Theater in NYC. At writing, New York had just clinched the win in San Antonio against the Spurs.

“I believe The Roots were the band for year one of [the festival],” said Questlove (Summer of Soul) before the screening. “There’s no way that you could have told the drummer in the band where he would be 25 years from now.”

The celebratory HBO doc titles Earth, Wind & Fire (To Be Celestial VS That’s the Weight of the World) tracks the decades-spanning story of the iconic American group and its enigmatic founder Maurice White, who passed away in 2016. From humble beginnings to epic stadium shows, the film looks at how the band took shape and changed over the years, constantly breaking new ground. The narrative is propelled by interviews with band members, family, famous fans like Barack and Michelle Obama, Flea, and Lionel Richie, line-drawn animation and tons of archival concert footage.

It was a terrific opening for a landmark anniversary. The inaugural fest, as is well known, was launched by De Niro and Rosenthal less than a year after 9/11 turned a swathe of Lower Manhattan into a hellscape of smoke, ash and rubble. The festival, a big street fair as its centerpiece, was a green shoot eight months later with recovery underway.

Planning that first fest, “I never thought we would be doing it again. Bob did,” Rosenthal tells Deadline. “We just wanted to give our community a new memory, and to give them something to look forward to.” Around year 10, she said, she realized it had staying power.

“You start to get into this rhythm where you’re preparing for the next festival during the current festival, so it feels like it just kept rolling and rolling, and here we are.”

De Niro says he was already “hoping after the first one we’d do it again. It seemed like it was very successful, especially with the street festival. But who would have thought it would go this far, become part of the fabric of the city? And I hope it will stay that way.”

In the runup to opening night, the duo hosted a gathering honoring former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg at the Perelman Performing Arts Center. PAC, at 251 Fulton Street, sits at the reconstituted transportation hub of the reimagined World Trade Center, all of which took shape under Bloomberg’s administration. The mayor, who came into office in January of 2002, was also crucial to the festival launch.

“We wouldn’t have even gotten to the first one without Mike’s innovative and passionate support,” said Rosenthal. Attendees at the event included former New York Gov. George Pataki, who, Rosenthal said, “announced the first festival with us, and walked with me and Liam Neeson to every firehouse in Lower Manhattan to give out tickets.”

Bloomberg, the billionaire philanthropist and founder of Bloomberg LLC, said it’s “hard to believe it has been more than two decades. And a lot really has happened in that time. Not just here, but all around the world.

“But enough about the Knicks,” he joked.

“When our administration was in City Hall, we worked to make sure that the plans for rebuilding the World Trade Center included a center for the arts, which play such an important role in bringing energy and vitality to neighborhoods. They create jobs and attract visitors that support local businesses. They make cities exciting places to live and to work. Artists bring inspiration and new insight to communities. The Tribeca Film Festival really is a great example of all of that. The idea was creative, bold, and ambitious. Thanks to the leaders at the Tribeca Film Festival for dreaming it up. They helped our city when we most needed it, and it helped jumpstart the revitalization of Lower Manhattan,” he told the crowd hailing from politics and entertainment.

Whoopi Goldberg, native New Yorker and early champion of the festival who continues to curate its animated shorts program, delivered the intro. She said Rosenthal and De Niro enlisted her early on and “I believed in the mission from the very beginning.” Then, “Michael Bloomberg came in and made us remember that the future could be better, that it didn’t have to be so bleak. We just needed to come together.”

Next Generation Of Filmmakers

The fest expanded, evolving into a mecca for music and documentaries, first-time and international directors, attracting ticket buyers from the community and a growing industry following. It added strands for TV, games, podcasts, reunions and retrospectives, talks, digital creators and branded content, shrugging off critics and carving out a role very different from the storied New York Film Festival that unspools at Lincoln Center each fall.

Tribeca eventually dropped the word “film” from its title to reflect the sprawl and shifted from capricious April to balmy June. It hasn’t had a street fair for years but was the first film festival to return after the pandemic, a palpably joyous event with outdoor screenings across the five boroughs. The 2026 edition is running a free outdoor screening series at Hudson Yards revisiting films from its past 25 years.

The Storytelling Summit, an eclectic stream of Q&As and talks, runs every day at the festival’s Spring Studios hub. Day 1 features Zach Braff, Lily Rabe and Hamish Linklater, a rundown of AMPAS development programs and a session on short-form storytelling. Last year, it added a dedicated theater for short films, which have seen an explosion in submissions. With 86 showing this year, it’s one of the most expansive programs of any major film festival.

“The discovery of new voices is ultimately what’s so special about the festival,” said Rosenthal. “We try to embrace that… because you want the next generation of filmmakers to remember where they got their start and to keep coming back. And you love it when you see that happening.”

Returning filmmakers this year include Josh Safdie and Benny Safdie (EPs on Alden Nusser and Ben Fries’ The Lion Queen), Edward Burns (Finnegan’s Foursome), Drake Doremus (Next Life), One9 (Alicia Keyes: Girl From Hell’s Kitchen — the closing night film), Hugo Ruiz (Dante), Sam Pollard (The Lorraine), Sophia Takal (Act One), Josh Alexander (Sara Bareilles: Good Grief) and Haifaa Al Mansour (Unidentified).  

The slate of 118 films from record submissions includes 108 world premieres and 55 first-time directors from 44 countries, among them Cameroon, Haiti, Mongolia, North Macedonia, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Malta, Dominican Republic, Nigeria, Iran, Turkey, Morocco, Qatar and the Philippines.

First-time directors include Sean Ono Lennon with threeASFOUR: Full Circle; Zach Woods with The Accompanist; Gabriel Basso’s Iconoclast: Quinn Whitney Wilson, who co-directs alongside Viridiana Lieberman, with Jean-Michel; Doron Max Hagay with She Keeps Me Young; and Ellie Sachs with Lucy Schulman.

“I find it really exciting that there are more submissions every year, that more work is being made and sent to us. That feels very encouraging for the health of the creative community,” festival director Cara Cusumano tells Deadline.

RELATED: Doc Talk Podcast: Tribeca’s Cara Cusumano Gives Us Lowdown On Lower Manhattan Festival’s Documentary Lineup

Music fare, which runs from Madonna’s “cinematic experience” tied to her new album, to a Katy Perry concert doc, a Mumford & Sons tour diary, a Peter Frampton career retrospective and Magdalena Bay’s visual album Imaginal Disc. Finneas makes an appearance, as does Este Haim. Bruce Springsteen will receive the 2026 Harry Belafonte Voices for Social Justice Award joined by Bono, De Niro and Patti Smith.

Music “feels like its growing exponentially every year,” says Cusumano. Opening night, for instance — Earth, Wind & Fire performing with The Roots — “is not a stop on the tour. This is something that is really for this evening and this moment in time.” They will play after the screening of Questlove’s Earth, Wind & Fire (To Be Celestial VS That’s the Weight of the World).

The film lineup is expansive, diverse and sprinkled with some big names. Quentin Tarantino appears in his first acting role in years in Jamie Adams’ drama Only What We Carry. Spike Lee is a writer on animated short Apart by Paola Manelli, about a forbidden friendship between two boys in apartheid South Africa.

Josh Greenbaum’s documentary Playing POTUS tackles the storied tradition of presidential parody. How To Feed a Dictator by Andrew Neel gathers testimonies from the kitchens of five of global history’s most notorious dictators — Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Augusto Pinochet and Kim Jong-il. Political thriller Killing Castro by Elf Rivera reimagines Fidel Castro’s 1960 stay in Harlem, featuring Al Pacino as a CIA operative. The Revisionist by Alex Vlack stars Allison Brie as a writer working on what will hopefully be her next best-selling novel, with Andre Holland, Dustin Hoffman and Tom Sturridge.

In Memoriam by Rob Burnett stars Marc Maron as a washed-up TV actor whose life goal becomes ensuring a place in the Academy Awards’ “In Memoriam” segment. Michael Gallagher’s The Leader stars Tim Blake Nelson and Vera Farmiga in the true story of the Heaven’s Gate cult.

The documentary Bob and David Climb Machu Picchu sees Bob Odenkirk and David Cross tackle one of the world’s toughest hikes. Paul Rudd stars in Rain Reign as the uncle of a 12-year-old neurodivergent middle schooler on a search for her lost dog.

Comedy Deepfake by Matt Eames follows a rudderless millennial who hires a team of Gen-Z consultants to reinvent her life. American Zoo by Tim Travers Hawkins explores the Catskill Game Farm, America’s first ever private zoo.

Docudrama Dreams of Violets by Ash Koosha bills itself as the first film 100% created by AI.

Angel Studios will world premiere Young Washington, a rare festival appearance for the faith-based distributor ahead of the film’s release in July for America’s 250^th birthday.

Asked if there was a big marketing push to mark Tribeca’s quarter of century, Rosenthal says, “You know, it’s interesting, nobody really cares that it’s our 25th except us. If people want to come to the festival they want to come because there’s good programming and fun things to do.”