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.
