Tribeca Film Festival coming to a Peoria television near you

By Sarah Sluis

Taking a cue from IFC Films, which has pursued day-and-date releases of its movies on-demand along with their theatrical release at New York's IFC Theatre and other select art houses, the Tribeca Film Festival will become a distributor of movies both year-round and during the festival. The theatrical platform will be called Tribeca Film, and the online version will be called TFFV (Tribeca Film Festival Virtual).

As someone who has not always had the benefit of living in a city as culturally rich as New York City (seriously, there is so much going on here), nor the inclination to make treks to various city centers for every cool thing going on there, I can see a strong demand for specialty movies finding a way to connect with isolated audiences over their televisions or laptop screens. Most of the people that would take advantage of these movies would have to rent or buy them on DVD anyway. Home exhibition systems that can give the movie an accurate, if not jaw-dropping, presentation, are standard nowadays. Plenty of people in Peoria would be interested!

The movies available on-demand will include niche titles like the environmental documentary Climate of Change, a biopic of someone famous

to select people, Ian Dury, in Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll, and what

sounds like a version of Eat, Pray, Love, or maybe The Darjeeling

Limited: Road, Movie, which follows a young man's journey through

India. All of these titles sound like good candidates for on-demand,

with their presumably smaller audiences and limited prospects of

theatrical release. Because the movies will premiere on VOD at the same time as the film festival, there will be some added free publicity. Instead of waiting months for the movie to show up on DVD, or, if they're lucky, a local specialty theatre, people will be able to see the movie at the same time as their city cousins. Given the select audience and niche content, I don't really see this as being a threat to theatre exhibitors. For them, showing these kinds of movies would be unprofitable or require an all-out marketing onslaught.

On the Internet, TFFV (Tribeca Film Festival Virtual) costs $45 and will run concurrently with the festival, showing select movies as they premiere at the New York event. There is a free version that offers the standard briefs and recaps, but the select version will have short films, Q&As, and everything to make a non-NYC-based film geek drool.

There is some precedence for this kind of move. Just this year, Sundance released feature-length films on Hulu, which currently exists as a section (sponsored by Bing) with clips from some films and free (ad-supported) feature-length versions of others (including years-old Super Size Me). On television, Sundance also offered three movies on-demand.

The way I see it, these types of alternative distribution ideas are a way to help match the increase in film production. With digital camcorders, making a movie is cheap, and there are far more films made than exhibited. Considering the kind of dreck that's out there, that's a good thing. But for every movie that deserves never to be seen, there's another that didn't reach a wide audience, was too niche, or too odd. I hope that on-demand, self-distribution, and other platforms can help these movies find an audience. And for viewers, it's a way to bring a little bit of that festival glitz to their own homes.