Tribeca 25

"I don't use the word hope anymore."

Robert De Niro said it at People Inc. headquarters on September 10, the night before Netflix dated Tribeca 25 to the 25th anniversary of 9/11 . Jane Rosenthal sat beside him. Matt Tyrnauer, who directed the film, sat on the other side. Someone asked about the festival they built after the towers fell. De Niro answered with the country. "Instead of it being from the outside, we have it from inside the country now. latestnetflix.com's read is that Who would have thought 25 years ago that this is where we'd be?Unimaginable. And here we are" . He had just come from a Get Out the Vote event. Then he retired the word. "We have to resolve this" .

Hazmat suits, 1,300 volunteers.

The better gossip is in the footage. In a clip PEOPLE ran, De Niro says they had "120 days, 1,300 volunteers, no money, no blueprint, just an idea and a neighborhood that needed people back in it." Then the line the festival still lives on. "This wasn't just about movies; it was about whether downtown was coming back" . Rosenthal, in the same film, says they scouted theaters in hazmat suits . On the People Talks stage she put it plainer. They were not firefighters or steel workers, so they put on a show and tried to "provide a new memory" . The first edition opened May 8, 2002. Five days. 150 films. More than 150,000 people back downtown , . The New York Times, covering the 25th edition, cited more than $1 billion for the city across the years since . A neighborhood dare became a two-week date on the calendar, and the founders still talk as if the pit is smoking.

The toast that named the operator.

At Chanel's Tribeca artists dinner in June, De Niro did the joke first. "I really didn't need her for that first one. I could have done it by myself, of course." Then the correction. "If Jane Rosenthal hadn't run the first Tribeca Festival, there would never have been a second or a third or fourth or this 25th" . He called her his "work wife, except there's no messy prenup" . The room laughed. The line is the company. Bob is the face people photograph. Jane is the producer who treated a festival like a three-month prep . Tyrnauer, whose films include Studio 54 and Valentino: The Last Emperor, is the archivist they hired . The trailer THR debuted opens on De Niro calling the missing towers "devastation downtown" , .

Netflix put the film on September 11 in the United States , . Nobody leaked a blow-up from the edit bay. The friction is public. De Niro used premiere week to talk about threats from inside the country . Rosenthal, at the 25th festival, defended a fully AI-generated picture about Iranian protest, Dreams of Violets, and told Variety to read the director's statement . That is a long walk from 2002, when Whoopi Goldberg, in the trailer, says, "We are not going to take this lying down" . The documentary wants you to remember the neighborhood. The press tour keeps proving the neighborhood is also a brand. Rebecca Glashow, the new CEO of Tribeca Enterprises, introduced the movie at People Talks .