By Michael Avila
Special to DNAinfo
TRIBECA — The Tribeca Film Festival is changing with the times.
Manhattan’s downtown, 12-day celebration of movies is out to reinvent how a film festival is presented by embracing new technology.
“On demand, online or here in New York City, you can experience the Tribeca Film Festival,” festival co-founder Jane Rosenthal said during Tuesday’s kickoff press conference.
“Wherever you are, you can be part of Tribeca,” added co-founder Robert De Niro.
The two longtime friends and business partners were joined at the event by Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney, who has three films at this year’s festival.
The Tribeca Film Festival Virtual gives fans a chance to skip the lines and instead buy a $45 pass to go online to www.tribecafilm.com and watch eight films premiering at this year’s festival.
The virtual fest begins with TriBeCa resident Ed Burns’ new film “Nice Guy Johnny” on Friday. Panel discussions, red carpet premieres and selected short films will also be available for free viewing on the festival’s website.
In addition, the festival is making a host of other movies available on Video-on-Demand through an agreement with cable providers like Time Warner Cable, RCN, Comcast, Verizon FiOS and Cablevision. Several world premieres are among the 15 movies being offered, including the extreme sports documentary “The Birth of Big Air” and the rock and roll biopic “Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll.” The films will debut on demand at the same time they premiere here in Manhattan.
Expanding the festival’s offerings to the online and on-demand platforms is critical since modern technology allows people to download and view movies anywhere, according to executive director Nancy Schafer.
“That’s why the Virtual Fest is so important, because it gives anyone with a computer connection a chance to view festival movies,” Schafer said.
The festival may be embrace modern technology, Rosenthal made sure to mention that Tribeca remains “a neighborhood festival” with theatrical screenings in the downtown neighborhood as the centerpiece.
No longer the sprawling, touch-all-corners event it quickly grew into after its debut in 2002, Tribeca has continued its recent theme of less is more.
The same number of feature films – 85 – will be screened this year as in 2009. That figure is less than half the number of features screened in 2005. The majority of this year’s 496 film screenings are scheduled for the festival’s home turf of Tribeca along with the Union Square/Chelsea area. Two popular family-friendly events, the Tribeca Drive-In and the Family Festival Street Fair, also take place in lower Manhattan.
During the press conference, De Niro offered up a few recommendations based on the movies he’s seen, including the documentaries “Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work,” “Earth Made of Glass,” “Climate of Change,” and Alex Gibney’s “My Trip to Al Qaeda.”
“I look forward to hearing what our audiences think of these films,” said the two-time Academy Award winning actor.
Rosenthal reiterated that the festival’s mission remains the same as it was when it first began back in 2002 in response to the Sept. 11 attacks — to be a symbol of pride and hope for Lower Manhattan.
Gibney, who made his Tribeca debut in 2007 with “Taxi to the Dark Side,” echoed those sentiments when answering why he wanted to debut “My Trip to Al Qaeda” here.
“It goes to the heart of what this festival represents,” he said about the movie, based on Lawrence Wright’s one-man play and which explores modern religious extremism and terrorism.
Gibney added that Tribeca was the only festival he would have considered screening his work-in-progress movie, “Untitled Eliot Spitzer Project.” Not just because the subject matter has obvious local appeal, but because of the inherent risk of showing an incomplete film.
“No filmmaker likes to show an unfinished movie, but this festival gives me the comfort to do so," Gibney said.
