Tribeca Day One
BY CYNDI GREENING, NEW YORK, USA – The east coast festival experience has begun and it is completely different from the Sundance experience. Sundance swallows up Park City, Utah and consumes the consciousness of everything around it. It becomes the have-all, be-all, end-all. Tribeca is held in lower Manhattan and, well, let's be honest, it would be awfully dang hard for anything to swallow The Big Apple. It felt like we walked a million miles today trying to get our press credenticals, locate the Box Office, get the details on Press Conferences and Press Screenings. We walked back and forth and around Tribeca. Lovely part of the city (in the past, I spent far more time on the Upper East Side, Union Square and Greenwich Village) with a feel all of its own.
Tribeca has about ten times the number of attendees as Sundance (465,000 vs. 42,000). They have about the same number of films. Tribeca reporterd 2250 feature submissions in all categories versus Sundance with 1502. Tribeca reports around 2300 short films were submitted from 41 different countries. Tribeca will screen 157 feature length films and 88 short films.
Tomorrow, we will screen FRAULEIN, a Swiss and German film about three women from the former Yugoslavia. We'll also be catching THE DEVIL RODE ON HORSEBACK, a documentary that I had wanted to see at Sundace but missed. Finally, we'll be going to a DIGITAL TO FILM WORKSHOP. There's a chance we'll be able to record it. They said it was lightly attended today. I hope that means we won't have trouble getting in tomorrow.
As festivals go, this is an odd one thus far. We've got ten more days to go so I'm sure it will shift for us soon. The press corps is omnipresent here ... far more so than at Sundance. There are reporters and broadcasters everywhere and the coverage is intense.