Tribeca Film Slate Boosts Indies
Tribeca Film Slate Boosts Indies
With an eye toward stronger independent and foreign-language titles, the Tribeca Film Festival on Thursday announced the remaining 45 films slated for its 11th edition next month.
Among the higher-profile features in the traditionally glossy Spotlight section are movies starring Chris Rock and Julie Delpy (“Two Days in New York”), Juliette Binoche (“Elles”), “Glee” star Chris Colfer (“Struck by Lightning”) and Oscar nominee Michelle Williams (who co-stars with Seth Rogen in the Sarah Polley-directed “Take This Waltz”).
The festival, which will run from April 18-29, also offers a dozen documentaries in Spotlight, including the world premiere of a new film by Morgan Spurlock (“Mansome,” about male body image), and the New York premiere of “Searching for Sugar Man,” an audience favorite at the recent Sundance Film Festival about a vanished Detroit folk singer who became a cult hero in South Africa.
Festival tickets will be $16 for evening and weekend screenings, and $8 for daytime weekday and late-night screenings. They’ll go on sale next Monday for the general public. Last week, the festival announced that the world premiere of Nicholas Stoller’s comedy “The Five-Year Engagement” will open the event.
Much of the full lineup complements the exploratory spirit of the previously announced World Narrative and World Documentary competition sections.
Established names such as directors Michael Winterbottom (back at the festival with “Trishna”) and Terry George (“Whole Lotta Sole”) draw notice. But so does work from lower-profile independent directors like Ira Sachs, whose autobiographical “Keep the Lights On” tracks 10 years in the relationship of a gay couple in New York, as well as Thai director Pen-ek Ratanaruang, whose “Headshot” is a fantastical noir in which the hero sees the world upside-down after taking a bullet through the skull.
“There’s a lot of filmmakers we’ve seen over the years who we’ve been following and this year we were excited to see that their films were ready, that we had a great response to them and they accepted our invitation,” said Genna Terranova, the festival’s director of programming. “This year we feel really proud that we’re able to support so many New York filmmakers, so many first-time filmmakers who are in this community. This year we have more films that we’re really excited about.”
The spectrum covers everything from the romantic whimsy of Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud’s “Chicken with Plums,” starring Mathieu Almaric as a broken-hearted violin player in 1950s Tehran, to Raymond De Felitta’s documentary “Booker’s Place: A Mississippi Story,” about civil rights, the American 1960s and a profound encounter in the life of his filmmaker father.
“The range of what we do in this section is sometimes hard to typify. It really does have a mainstream quality, and yet it deals with music, pop culture, with other kinds phenomena,” said Geoff Gilmore, chief creative officer of Tribeca Enterprises. “But we’re also very comfortable showcasing work that’s a little more challenging.”
Once again, the festival will produce the genre-oriented Cinemania section, which boasts thrillers and horror films from the Philippines, Norway, Finland and France. Among the more outrageous titles is “Eddie: The Sleepwalking Cannibal,” a Danish-Canadian production starring Danish heartthrob Thure Lindhardt, who shows a different side of himself from the one he exposes as the lead in Sachs’s bittersweet “Keep the Lights On.”
The ESPN Sports Film Festival sidebar will feature five documentaries, including the gala selection “Benji,” about 17-year-old Chicago basketball phenom Ben Wilson who was murdered in 1984, and — on the lighter side — a movie called “Knuckleball!”
