The sixth annual Tribeca Film Festival in New York kicks 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 September 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 told AFP.
"When it started out, it was helping the rebuilding of Tribeca spiritually, financially, and culturally and it's still doing that," added De Niro.
From the beginning it attracted filmmakers from all over the world, said Rosenthal. "If anything, that has gotten stronger as years have gone on."
"I think the fact that we show a different point of view in some of these films is a positive thing," she added. "We try to give a balanced point of view and we try to add a different perspective."
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 September 11 widows spending time in Afghanistan.
"One of the most exciting things about film is when it's able to depict the transformation of people's lives," the festival's executive director, Peter Scarlet, told AFP, hailing the courage of the protagonists.
"Two people who had the most unimaginably tragic loss decided that what they wanted to do was reach beyond their own pain and help other people, whom they came to understand were in even worse circumstances than they were," he said.
There is also a strong environmental theme, following on from February's "green" Oscars. Former vice president Al Gore is to open the festival with a series of shorts on global warming.
Scarlet said the strong line-up of films dealing with issues from Iraq to Afghanistan and 911 to Guantanamo Bay reflected the circumstances of the festival's birth as well as the nature of the modern world.
"We have yet to become a peacetime festival and with a war raging, what's more natural than for good filmmakers to be making films about it and making sense of it?" he said.
The international nature of issues and filmmakers featured also reflected New York's own diversity, he said.
"We're based in this multi-ethnic, multi-racial crossroads of world culture," he said. "The programming of the festival here has to reflect that.
"Some of the most honored filmmakers in the world come here to get their first American, and sometimes world, premiere showings," Scarlet said.
While film festivals have sprung up in increasingly obscure places in recent years, Scarlet said Tribeca stood out because of its heritage and the top quality films on offer.
"This one is special because it started for generous and honest motives, to help that neighborhood get back on its feet," he said, while admitting it was difficult not to feel cynical about the profusion of festivals.
He said good festivals provided a "human context" missing in the multiplex age, by offering the opportunity to hear filmmakers talk about their work and fostering an environment where people discuss films with other filmgoers.
"When you go out to see the movies tonight, you shell out your money, you buy your Coke, you sit down, you see the trailers, you see the movie and then in most multiplexes you are ejected, not unlike a fecal product through the intestinal tract, out the back of the theater, past the trash cans."
"Are you going to talk to anyone there? Probably not. You're probably not going to talk to anyone on the way in. At a film festival you may go, 'What did you think of that Romanian film?' and begin to talk," he said.
"Maybe the only chance all of us have to figure out what the hell's going on (in the world) and to make it feel a little bit less crazy is through movies. People understand other people better through films."