The 2008 Tribeca Film Festival today announced the line-ups for its World Narrative and World Documentary Feature Film Competitions.
The New York festival - now in its seventh year - also announced the films it will screen inn the Encounters section. The Festival will take place in Lower Manhattan from April 23 to May 4.
The Festival has announced it will present a "streamlined" selection of 122 feature films down from the 155 that made up the programme last year. The organisers have suggested this is because there had been suggestions it was getting too unwieldy.
The films have been selected from 2,329 feature submissions and represent 31 different countries. They include 55 world premieres, 10 international premieres, 26 North American premieres, eight US premieres and 18 New York City premieres.
Some 145 directors will be presenting feature works at the Festival, with 66 of these presenting their feature directorial debuts.
Twelve narrative features and an equal number of documentary features will compete for combined unrestricted cash prizes amounting to $100,000, including prizes totaling $50,000 from American Express for the Best New Narrative and Documentary Filmmakers. These 24 films come from 18 countries and over half of the filmmakers in competition will be making their feature directorial debuts.
Festival co-founder Jane Rosenthal said: "Each year the festival's programming team sets out to bring together a community of filmmakers from around the world and around the corner to share their artistic visions and stories with our international audiences and industry."
"This year’s Festival is a quintessential reflection of our world."
Artistic Director Peter Scarlet, added: "This year our narrative and feature competitions and our Encounters selections include a few works by directors who are well-known on the international scene— Egypt’s Yousry Nasrallah, England’s Shane Meadows, Germany’s Rosa von Praunheim and Morocco’s Nabil Ayouch as well as our own Robert Drew and Melvin Van Peebles, but most of these outstanding films are by promising new talents and that’s exciting news for us all."
Tribeca also announced the return of the popular Tribeca/ESPN Sports Film Festival launched last year.
Eleven films will be part of this program as well as the main festival slate and will be announced in their main sections but all share a focus on sports or competition. In addition to screening with all the other films in the Festival slate, these movies will play as part of two Tribeca/ESPN Sports Film Festival marathon days – on Sunday, April 27 and Saturday, May 3 – during which audiences will have the opportunity to screen the films back-to-back.
We'll be bringing you news of all the film strands as they are announced - plus coverage of the Festival from April 23
For more information, visit the official site.
