The Tribeca Film Festival was founded in 2002 by a crew headed by Robert De Niro producer Jane Rosenthal. The first festival, thrown together after some four months of planning, was conceived in part as a response to the 9/11 attacks, an attempt to help revitalize and repair the economy and culture of lower Manhattan. In the years since, the Tribeca Festival has taken on its own identity as a sort of spring time counterpart to the New York Film Festival, with a more populist attitude towards celebrity glitter and commercial blockbusters. (That year, Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones was among the premieres.) The festival has continued to develop its own identity, and a certain amount of sprawl has come to seem a part of that. Last year, there may have been a bit too much sprawl; the 160-feature program, which wandered outside the bounds of Manhattan, reminded some observers of the critic David Chute's line about another messy film festival that seemed to have been designed along the lines specified by Monty Python's Mr. Creosote, everything mixed together in a bucket with an egg on top. Jane Rosenthal wants prospective festival-goers to know that they have heard your pleas, and they are responding.
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