The sixth annual Tribeca Film Festival in New York kicked off on Wednesday with a strong line-up of international documentaries and features tackling some of the world's most controversial issues, from war to global warming.
With 157 feature films and 88 shorts from a total of 47 countries, the festival is offering a smaller program than last year, but organizers are promising a high quality line-up with no fewer than 73 world premieres.
"The festival is getting more and more strong and popular," actor and director Robert De Niro, who co-founded the festival, said in an interview ahead of the opening. The event runs until May 6 throughout New York city.
The festival emerged in 2002 out of the ashes of the Sept. 11 attacks the previous year and was intended to help breathe new life into a devastated city, and particularly the downtown Tribeca area.
"It was our way to try to help heal our community. It was the only thing we knew how to do to help," producer and co-founder Jane Rosenthal said.
"When it started out, it was helping the rebuilding of Tribeca spiritually, financially, and culturally and it's still doing that," added De Niro.
Among the films most likely to attract attention are documentaries I Am an American Soldier: One Year in Iraq with the 101st Airborne, and Beyond Belief, about two Sept. 11 widows spending time in Afghanistan.
There is also a strong environmental theme, following on from February's "green" Oscars. Former US vice president Al Gore is to open the festival with a series of shorts on global warming.
The ashes of Star Trek star James Doohan will be blasted into space tomorrow when a rocket carrying a symbolic portion of the late actor's cremated remains is launched in New Mexico.
Doohan, beloved for his role as the USS Enterprise's chief engineer Montgomery "Scotty" Scott, died aged 85 in 2005, but plans for his posthumous rendezvous with the stars have been repeatedly delayed.
However, launch organizers at Space Services Inc are confident that Doohan's wishes will finally be granted when their SpaceLoft XL rocket blasts off from the Spaceport America private launchpad near Las Cruces, in New Mexico.
SSI offers a variety of services for families wishing to shoot the remains of loved ones into space.
Launching a single gram of ashes comes with a US$495 price tag, while sending remains into deep space, a service which comes into effect from 2009 will cost up to US$12,500.
Back on Earth, Oscar-winner Robin Williams and John Travolta have signed on to star in a Disney comedy, Old Dogs, Variety reported earlier this week.
The buddy movie tells the story of old friends whose lives are turned upside down when they find themselves responsible for seven-year-old twins, the report said.
The film, directed by Walt Becker, also was to feature Travolta's daughter, Ella Travolta.
Travolta, 53, was a ladykiller in Saturday Night Fever, just a killer in Pulp Fiction, and is now hoping to kill at the box office as a transvestite in the silver-screen adaptation of the musical Hairspray.
Williams, 55, took home a best supporting actor Academy Award in 1998 for Good Will Hunting, and recently starred in RV, Happy Feet, Man of the Year and the upcoming License to Wed.
Other Hollywood heavyweights teaming up are director Steven Spielberg and actor Tom Hanks who are producing a television miniseries focused on World War II battles in the Pacific, the Variety reported.
Shooting will begin next year in Australia for the series, which will appear on the HBO cable channel in 2009.
Spielberg and Hanks previously produced the 2001 series Band of Brothers, which recounted the experiences of American soldiers fighting in Europe during World War II.
Meanwhile, Michael Douglas is to star in a new film based on a 2000 civil lawsuit against US auto giant Ford over safety issues in its sports utility vehicles.
The Oscar-winning star of Wall Street and Traffic would play the attorney who took Ford to court on behalf of a single mother from Texas left paralyzed after an accident.
Lawyer Tab Turner won a multi-million US dollar settlement for Donna Bailey in the case, reputed to be the biggest product liability case in US history.
"This gives me the chance to play a different kind of character. I played a lawyer once, in Fatal Attraction, and there wasn't much about the law in that picture," Douglas said.
The film would be based on journalist Adam Penenberg's 2003 book Tragic Indifference: One Man's Battle With the Auto Industry Over the Dangers of SUVs.
A few weeks ago I found myself at a Family Mart talking with the morning shift worker there, who has become my coffee guy. Both of us were in a funk over the “unseasonable” warm weather, a state of mind known as “solastalgia” — distress produced by environmental change. In fact, the weather was not that out of the ordinary in boiling Central Taiwan, and likely cooler than the temperatures we will experience in the near-future. According to the Taiwan Adaptation Platform, between 1957 and 2006, summer lengthened by 27.8 days, while winter shrunk by 29.7 days. Winter is not
Taiwan’s post-World War II architecture, “practical, cheap and temporary,” not to mention “rather forgettable.” This was a characterization recently given by Taiwan-based historian John Ross on his Formosa Files podcast. Yet the 1960s and 1970s were, in fact, the period of Taiwan’s foundational building boom, which, to a great extent, defined the look of Taiwan’s cities, determining the way denizens live today. During this period, functionalist concrete blocks and Chinese nostalgia gave way to new interpretations of modernism, large planned communities and high-rise skyscrapers. It is currently the subject of a new exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Modern
March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
In recent years, Slovakia has been seen as a highly democratic and Western-oriented Central European country. This image was reinforced by the election of the country’s first female president in 2019, efforts to provide extensive assistance to Ukraine and the strengthening of relations with Taiwan, all of which strengthened Slovakia’s position within the European Union. However, the latest developments in the country suggest that the situation is changing rapidly. As such, the presidential elections to be held on March 23 will be an indicator of whether Slovakia remains in the Western sphere of influence or moves eastward, notably towards Russia and