By Aaron Hillis

Still developing its identity like any five-year-old, the Tribeca Film Festival (April 25 to May 7) has grown significantly since its humble birth. A brainchild of founders Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal, the fest originally sought to bring people and business back to lower Manhattan following the World Trade Center attacks. Around 35,000 tickets were sold that first year, and nearly 250,000 filmgoers are expected for the 2006 festival. With the colossal increase in films, venues, post screening Q&As, panel discussions, sidebar events, and sponsors (besides American Express, whose ubiquitous logos have always been synonymous with the fest), Tribeca might be overwhelming to the uninitiated–and even to past attendees. It's too soon to tell if this baby has grown up too quickly, but an early peek at the programming schedule looks mighty encouraging. PREMIERE presents a few of the buzzworthy highlights.

Tribeca's lineup is divided into categories, and perhaps the closest watched is the International Narritive Feature Competition, with 17 juried picks. Writer-director Jake Kasdan's The TV Set is a biting satire of the boob-tube industry, starring David Duchovny as a producer trying to maintain dignity after his pilot is increasingly mangled by the network. John Malkovich tries being someone besides himself in Brian Cook's Colour Me Kubrick, based on the ridiculous but true story of a man who impersonated legendary filmmaker Stanley Kubrick in the '90s. If you've ever wondered what an Egyptian blockbuster looks like, meet the tenants of The Yacoubian Building. Besides being the most expensive film to rise from the land of sphinxes, director Marwan Hamed's multi narrative drama breaks cultural taboos in its exploration of Islamic fundamentalism, adultery, political corruption, and homosexuality. Equally epic in length is German auteur Matthias Glasner's The Free Will, a savage and complex love story that challenges audiences to find sympathy for its lead character, a convicted rapist.

At first glance, the International Documentary Competition seems more concerned with proclaiming its post-9/11 awareness than it does championing cinematic diversity, but I won't cry "liberal guilt" until I've seen these docs for myself. Middle Eastern wartime issues are represented from multiple angles in The Blood of My Brother; Shadow of Afghanistan; Dear Father, Quiet, We're Shooting…; and The War Tapes. Specific to Iran, the survivors of a 2003 earthquake are sensitively preserved in Voices of Bam, and the country's new revolution of underground music distribution is heard about in Sounds of Silence. From the prevention-hotline department, Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple profiles the sinister minister who orchestrated a mass suicide in Guyana in 1978, while The Bridge speaks to the families of those who have leapt to their death from the Golden Gate Bridge, each suicide first captured on-camera by director Eric Steel.

There are a dozen programs' worth of short films from around the world, but prizes will also be awarded to filmmakers shooting locally in the NY, NY Narrative and Documentary Competitions. Looking through Shoja Azari's Windows reveals an intimately dark and suspenseful vision of contemporary America and an unusual storytelling format: its 80-minute running time is composed of only nine scenes, each shot in a single take. Thumbsucker's Lou Taylor Pucci stars as a party-boy college student who needs to sell Fifty Pills of ecstacy to pay for his tuition in Theo Avgerino's directorial debut, featuring Kristen Bell (TV's Veronica Mars). If American Cannibal: The Road to Reality is half the sensationalized guilty pleasure its trailer promises, this documentary about a doomed reality-TV show from two sitcom writers and a producer of the Paris Hilton sex tape could hilariously expose the emptiness of this prime-time genre. If you're a sucker for character portraits, the NY, NY docs offer some fascinating personalities. Between the female Marxist journalist who may be canonized (Dorothy Day: Don't Call Me a Saint), an octogenarian Japanese-American artist living on the streets (The Cats of Miriktani), and a legendary experimental filmmaker who helped define New York's underground culture (Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis), the eccentric and progressive-minded are on full display.