Rize
New York Premiere

Rize

| USA | 85 MINUTES | English

Fashion photographer and music video director David LaChappelle is best known for glamorizing the underground in his work, legitimizing typically unheralded figures like transsexual plastic surgery aficionados and club kids and raising them to ghetto superstar status in his highly stylized shoots. In doing so he has maintained a keen eye on the streets that has served him well in his frenetically choreographed, giddily urban pop music videos for Christina Aguilera and Gwen Stefani. What is so refreshing about LaChappelle's documentary feature debut, Rize, is that the director skirts his instantly recognizable pop sheen in favor of a more organic approach to the nascent style of street performance known as krumping or clowning. Forged in the back yards, public parks, and playgrounds of working-class African-American neighborhoods in South Central Los Angeles as a means of personal expression and symbolic escape, krumping comes across as a grass-roots amalgam of Busta Rhymes' epileptic stage presence, those bossy competitive dance-offs that have ruled youth culture from West Side Story to Britney and Justin and the break dancing that burst out of the South Bronx in the early days of hip-hop. In Rize, LaChappelle's young subjects seize and jerk with such exhilarating force that watching them becomes a sort of transcendence; if the original breakers popped and locked as a means of forging personal style in decaying urban wastelands, then krumpers and clowners vibrate like human jackhammers, performing a ritualized urban renewal using the ultimate in homegrown tools: themselves.

* Rush Tickets available at venue except for
Beacon Theatre
Rush will be offered when advanced tickets for a screening or event are no longer available at venues other than Beacon Theatre.
The Rush system functions as a standby line that will form at the venue approximately one hour prior to scheduled start time. Admittance is based on availability and will begin roughly 10 minutes prior to program start time. Rush Tickets are the same price as advance tickets and are payable upon entry.

Newsletter

Subscribe for festival news, exclusive offers, programming updates, and more!
Get Festival Updates

Tribeca Festival Partners

Presenting Partner
Signature Partners
Presenting Partner
Signature Partners
Presenting Partner
Signature Partners
Presenting Partner
Supporters
Presenting Partner
Friends of the Festival
Presenting Partner
Media Friends of the Festival
Presenting Partner
Media Friends of the Festival
Presenting Partner
Industry Partners
See all partners