The Tribeca Film Festival unveiled winners of this year’s Audience Awards on Saturday (4/28) with To Dust topping the narrative competition and United Skates being voted best documentary.
Directed by Shawn Snyder and starring Matthew Broderick and Geza Rohrig, To Dust tells the story of a Hasidic cantor who’s traumatized by the death of his wife and obsesses over how her body will decay. He seeks answers from a local biology professor in this, the unlikeliest of buddy comedies.
Directed by Dyana Winkler and Tina Brown, United Skates chronicles America’s roller rinks which helped spawn East Coast hip-hop and West Coast rap. As rinks close across the country, a few activists mount a last stand to save these bastions of regional African-American culture, music and dance.
2nd place
Taking second place in the Audience Award narrative derby was the Ondi Timoner-directed Mapplethorpe which stars Matt Smith in the title role of art school dropout Robert Mapplethorpe who goes on to become the enfant terrible of the photography world as the downtown counterculture of 1970s New York reaches its zenith.
The documentary runner-up was Momentum Generation from directors/writers Jeff Zimbalist and Michael Zimbalist. The film introduces us to a band of teen surfers came together on the north shore of Oahu in the 1990s. Their unbridled talent and strong bonds of friendship would bring professional surfing to new heights. But as their stars rose, those bonds are tested.
The winners of the Audience Awards were determined by audience votes made throughout the Tribeca Film Festival via the Festival app.
Alec Baldwin Urges Judge To Stand By Dismissal Of Involuntary Manslaughter Case In “Rust” Shooting
Alec Baldwin urged a New Mexico judge on Friday to stand by her decision to skuttle his trial and dismiss an involuntary manslaughter charge against the actor in the fatal shooting of a cinematographer on the set of a Western movie.
State District Court Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer dismissed the case against Baldwin halfway through a trial in July based on the withholding of evidence by police and prosecutors from the defense in the 2021 shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of the film "Rust."
The charge against Baldwin was dismissed with prejudice, meaning it can't be revived once any appeals of the decision are exhausted.
Special prosecutor Kari Morrissey recently asked the judge to reconsider, arguing that there were insufficient facts and that Baldwin's due process rights had not been violated.
Baldwin, the lead actor and co-producer on "Rust," was pointing a gun at cinematographer Halyna Hutchins during a rehearsal when it went off, killing her and wounding director Joel Souza. Baldwin has said he pulled back the hammer — but not the trigger — and the revolver fired.
The case-ending evidence was ammunition that was brought into the sheriff's office in March by a man who said it could be related to Hutchins' killing. Prosecutors said they deemed the ammunition unrelated and unimportant, while Baldwin's lawyers alleged that they "buried" it and filed a successful motion to dismiss the case.
In her decision to dismiss the Baldwin case, Marlowe Sommer described "egregious discovery violations constituting misconduct" by law enforcement and prosecutors, as well as false testimony about physical evidence by a witness during the trial.
Defense counsel says that prosecutors tried to establish a link... Read More