The Tribeca Festival is underway in New York, marking the US's first in-person film festival since the start of the pandemic.
Now in its 20th year, the event has dropped "film" from its title, as the event also features shorts, TV series, podcasts and games.
This year, the Features programme will include 66 productions from 81 filmmakers from 23 countries, as well as 56 world premieres. The event kicked off on Wednesday with the premiere of Jon M Chu's adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical In the Heights.
Over the weekend, a number of premieres took place, including A$AP Rocky documentary Stockholm Syndrome. The film follows the rapper's rise to fame, and details the dark turn his story took when he was imprisoned following a violent altercation in Stockholm, Sweden, during the European leg of his 2019 tour. Rocky, real name Rakim Mayers, was present at the documentary's premiere, alongside co-producers Matthew Perniciaro and Michael Sherman.
Also enjoying its premiere at the festival was Oklahoma-made thriller, Asking For It, which stars Vanessa Hudgens, Ezra Miller and Luke Hemsworth. Hudgens attended the film's presentation, dressed in a leopard print shirt dress, which she teamed with a slick bun up-do.
With/In, a documentary-style film starring Julianne Moore, Don Cheadle, Rebecca Hall and more, was shot on iPhone and tasked people to shoot a short film dealing with quarantine life in 2020. Sanaa Lathan and Chris Cooper make their directorial debuts with With/In as Bart Freundlich helms the project. The result is a touchingly optimistic record of one of this generation's most difficult years.
Tommy Thayer, Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons and Eric Singer of Kiss were also in attendance for the premiere of their documentary, Biography: KISStory.
The celebrate, the band also put on a mini concert at the Festival's Battery Park location, with performances of Detroit Rock City, Shout It Out Loud, War Machine and Heaven's on Fire. It was the band's first live performance in more than a year.
While there was initial worry that submissions for this year's Tribeca would be on the lower side because of the pandemic, festival director Cara Cusumano said it’s had an opposite effect.
"We didn't know what to expect, submissions wise," she told Variety magazine. "I had heard from colleagues that festivals had been seeing fewer submissions this year, which makes sense, but our submissions actually did go up. We had over 10,000 in total, across all of our sections."
