Tribeca Film Festival Is Back, Beginning April 23

POSTED APRIL 1, 2008

The Tribeca Film Festival is a leaner affair this year, with most screenings limited to Lower Manhattan and Union Square and a fourth fewer features. But it still manages to pack the calendar with more screenings, panel discussions and other events than can reasonably be attended by even the most dedicated film buffs.

The festival opens April 23 with a red-carpet premiere, “Baby Mama,” a comedy featuring Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Sigourney Weaver and Greg Kinnear—and continues for a dozen days and nights of near nonstop screenings.

Those 120-plus features are culled from nearly 5,000 entries, a number that grows each year. Peter Scarlet, the festival’s executive director, traveled to 12 countries over the last year (from Iraq and Kurdistan to Berlin and the Basque country) in search of little-known gems.

“The overall world ratio of sh-- to shinola shifts away from shinola more every year,” Scarlet notes, “simply because…now it’s easier to make movies. You can go out and buy a decent camera for 500 bucks and make a film. But every once in a while you see a remarkable film that couldn’t have been made 20 years ago.”

Along with its load of weighty documentaries and serious narratives, the festival has its lighter offerings, too. There are films for sports fans, comedies that range from subtle to silly to bizarre. And, of course, fare for the whole family.

“Jump in the pool, gang,” Scarlet says. “There’s a lot of interesting stuff here.”

More info is at www.tribecafilmfestival.org.

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