Tribeca showcases eclectic mix

The Tribeca Film Festival opens next month with 89 feature films from new and established directors, ranging from hard-hitting documentaries to romantic and teenage comedies and gripping dramas. More than 6,000 films from 30 countries were submitted to this year’s festival, which was established more than a decade ago to revitalise the New York neighbourhood badly affected by the September 11 attacks. Along with the 34 documentaries and 55 narrative feature films, the festival, which runs from April 17 to 28, will include five projects in a new section called Storyscapes about trends in digital media. The romantic comedy The Pretty One, the final chapter of Richard Linklater’s trilogy Before Midnight, and Neil Jordan’s gothic, vampire drama Byzantium will be among the narrative fiction films. “When we talk about the narrative competition, we talk about the kind of films that left us thinking about that film two days later, that really made a personal impact on us, that moved us,” said Geoff Gilmore, the creative chief officer of Tribeca Enterprises. The festival will kick off with the world premiere of Mistaken for Strangers. It depicts the experiences of the director Tom Berninger on tour with his brother, Matt, the frontman of the rock band The National, who will perform following the premiere. Big Men, a documentary written and directed by Rachel Boynton and produced by Brad Pitt, will have its world debut and open the world documentary section. “Big Men is an inside look into at the African oil industry and the American oil industry,” said Genna Terranova, the director of programming for the festival. Another documentary, Gasland Part II, directed and written by Josh Fox, delves into the consequences of fracking. The actress Emma Roberts appears in Andy Cochran’s Adult World, in which she plays a poet who is being mentored by a reclusive writer played by John Cusack. Paul Rudd and Paul Giamatti team up in the buddy comedy Almost Christmas by the director Phil Morrison, while Melissa Leo plays a mother whose child is addicted to pain killers in the film Bottled Up, by Enid Zentelis. From : The National