Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal had talked about starting a film festival before Sept. 11, 2001. Neither of them had treated the idea as especially urgent.
That changed in the weeks after the attacks. Speaking alongside Rosenthal and Tribeca 25 director Matt Tyrnauer at People Inc.’s New York headquarters on Sept. 10, De Niro recalled the moment the loose idea became a real commitment, according to PEOPLE.
“Let’s do it,” De Niro remembered telling Rosenthal. The goal was bigger than putting movies on screens. Lower Manhattan had been devastated, businesses were struggling and the neighborhood needed people to come downtown again.
Neither De Niro nor Rosenthal had experience organizing a film festival. They approached the problem the way they knew how, like producers trying to get a movie ready on an unforgiving deadline.
A Casual Festival Idea Suddenly Became Urgent
De Niro said he and Rosenthal had previously kicked around the possibility of a festival without making a serious commitment. After the World Trade Center attacks, the conversation changed from whether they might do it to how quickly they could make it happen.
Rosenthal remembered feeling that they had to find some practical way to help. They were not firefighters or steel workers, she said, but they knew how to put on screenings, produce events and create reasons for people to gather.
The pair announced the festival in November 2001. Tribeca’s institutional history also credits Craig Hatkoff as a co-founder alongside De Niro and Rosenthal.
The first festival opened the following May. Its mission was deliberately local, bring foot traffic back to Lower Manhattan, help struggling businesses and give New Yorkers something downtown that was not defined solely by grief and destruction.
Rosenthal has also recalled the “Dinner Downtown” events that preceded the festival, designed to encourage New Yorkers to return to restaurants in Chinatown, Little Italy and other downtown neighborhoods. The response helped reinforce the idea that getting people physically back into the area could itself become part of the recovery.
They Had 120 Days, 1,300 Volunteers and No Blueprint
The first Tribeca Film Festival was assembled in roughly four months. De Niro has described the operation as having 120 days, 1,300 volunteers, almost no resources and no established blueprint for what the team was trying to build.
Rosenthal said even finding usable theaters created problems unlike anything they had encountered producing films. Some spaces had to be inspected while staff wore protective gear because Lower Manhattan was still dealing with contamination and debris from the attacks.
De Niro remembered another constant reminder outside the office windows. Ground Zero was still smoking while the team worked. Ordinary production problems suddenly looked very different against what was happening only blocks away.
The inaugural festival opened May 8, 2002 and ran for five days. A Tribeca Studios account says it presented 150 films selected from 13,000 submissions.
More than 150,000 people came downtown during that first edition, turning what had begun as a civic response into an event large enough to alter the atmosphere of the neighborhood almost immediately.
Nelson Mandela Helped Set the Tone for Opening Day
De Niro also wanted the festival’s opening to communicate something larger than the launch of another entertainment-industry event. Rosenthal recalled that De Niro suggested inviting Nelson Mandela and personally called the former South African president.
Mandela had spoken about the role movies played among prisoners during his years on Robben Island and the common ground they could create under extraordinary circumstances. Mandela accepted the invitation and attended the festival’s May 8 opening ceremony.
His own archived remarks from that night directly connected the gathering to the Sept. 11 attacks. Mandela spoke about New York still living with the aftermath of what had happened and about the resilience that collective sorrow can produce.
The first edition eventually became an annual festival that expanded well beyond film into television, music, games, audio storytelling, talks and immersive work.
‘Tribeca 25’ Returns to the Festival’s Original Mission
That rushed first year is now the subject of Matt Tyrnauer’s documentary Tribeca 25. The film combines archival footage with new interviews involving De Niro, Rosenthal, Martin Scorsese, Bono, Bruce Springsteen, Whoopi Goldberg, Nas, Jon M. Chu, Nia DaCosta, Denis Leary and other figures connected to the festival’s history.
It also follows what happened after the first edition. Tribeca became an important platform for filmmakers including Ryan Coogler, Damien Chazelle, Chu and DaCosta, while the organization says its events have generated more than $1 billion in economic impact for New York City since the festival began.
Tyrnauer describes the documentary as a story about reinvention and the relationship between art and civic life. Tribeca 25 arrives on Netflix in the U.S. on Sept. 11, exactly 25 years after the attacks that turned De Niro and Rosenthal’s casual conversation about a film festival into a commitment to build one.