Inside Vanity Fair’s Tribeca Directors Dinner With Questlove, Katie Holmes, and More

Amid a flurry of screenings and parties for the 23rd Tribeca Film Festival, more than 20 filmmakers and Vanity Fair creatives gathered together for a dinner in the sky. Well, not quite that high. But inside the private event space of Four Seasons Hotel Downtown—which, at 926 feet, is the tallest residential tower in downtown Manhattan—you couldn’t help but feel like you were up in the stars, as VF editor in chief Radhika Jones and Condé Nast global head of film & television Helen Estabrook cohosted an intimate affair on Tuesday.

To honor the sold-out Tribeca premiere of Vanity Fair Studios’ documentary Breath of Fire on June 12, directors including Charlotte Wells, a BAFTA Award winner for her debut feature Aftersun, and Frédéric Tcheng, who has made projects about fashion visionaries including Dior, Bethann Hardison, and Halston, mingled with the likes of Rebecca Miller, fresh off her latest film, She Came to Me, alongside director Elegance Bratton and producer Chester Gordon—who broke out with 2022’s The Inspection starring Jeremy Pope.

“We have a lot of studio projects in the works,” says Radhika Jones. “We wanted to mark that occasion, and plan a low-key and fun evening with directors who we really admire and who are doing great work. It felt like a good time to get together and compare notes.”

Whispers about upcoming projects filtered through cocktail hour conversations on the breezy terrace of the Four Seasons, where guests sipped champagne and snacked on passed appetizers of tuna tartare and burrata. Katie Holmes, joined by her personal stylist Brie Welch, chatted with Katie Aselton, who wrote her upcoming project Magic Hour with husband Mark Duplass. Questlove, attending the dinner with intimacy coordinator Laura Desiree, spoke with fellow Oscar winner Jimmy Chin as guests sat down for dinner. (Questlove won an Oscar for producing 2022’s best documentary feature, Summer of Soul, the same award Chin took home in 2019 alongside his personal and professional partner, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi for Free Solo.)

The celebrations all led back to the imminent debut of Breath of Fire, a limited documentary series airing later this year on HBO that explores modern spirituality through the unlikely rise and real-time fall of the guru behind a multibillion dollar wellness empire: kundalini yoga. Based on Hayley Phelan’s exclusive December 2021 story, Jones says the unscripted project “was born as a classic magazine feature and as the story changed and developed, it became clear to us that we wanted to find every way possible for this story to reach a wider audience.”

Breath of Fire codirectors Hayley Pappas and Smiley Stevens were greeted warmly at the dinner, where they reflected on the winding journey toward their latest documentary. Stevens says they were first alerted to the group’s story on Easter Day 2020, although she had already encountered some kundalini followers out in the wild. “I would see the people at Whole Foods wearing all white,” says Stevens. “It’s been a long time coming,” adds Pappas, who described the collaboration between the filmmakers and Phelan as “symbiotic” in nature. “We had done a lot of development work in one world, and Hayley Phelan had secured a lot of access in another world, so it ended up being really complementary.”

As the first course of summer bean salad was being served, Estabrook—joined by Sarah Amos and Jodi Hildebrand, who lead unscripted and scripted television and film projects at Condé Nast, respectively—delivered brief opening remarks. Estabrook pointed to Breath of Fire as an example “of exactly what we’re trying to do within Vanity Fair Studios, which is tell stories that are fascinating and emotional and resonant.”