The Freedom Tower

The Times reports the image of the French daredevil Philippe Petit, dancing across a high wire between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in James Marsh’s exhilarating documentary “Man on Wire,” is as rich a metaphor for the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival as you could imagine.
This story has a familiar ring for me because I actually covered Petit’s historic walk when I was a reporter for United Press Internatinal and I also covered his subsequent arrest for his Twin Tower’s walk and was sentenced for doing it by a New York judge to return to Central Park and perform for we New Yorkers in another death-defying wire walk in the park.
Oh, those were the days.
On Aug. 7, 1974, Mr. Petit, then 24, tiptoed onto a cable suspended 1,350 feet above the ground and crossed it eight times in 45 minutes before the police forced him down. Peter Scarlet, the Tribeca festival’s artistic director, describes Mr. Petit’s feat as epitomizing the festival’s precarious “balancing of art and commerce.”
In this year’s festival, which begins on Wednesday and runs through May 4 at theaters around New York, that balance has tilted more toward art, although there are still plenty of bells and whistles. It demonstrates that the festival is finally settling into its own identity and establishing itself as a major international showcase.
“Man on Wire,” much of which was filmed atop the World Trade Center, also relates profoundly to the festival’s origins as a community redevelopment project sprung from the ashes of 9/11. (And as you watch Mr. Petit and his team making their secret preparations for the stunt, the eerie similarity to an elaborate terrorist plot is unmistakable.) Since then, one of the festival’s original goals — to help revitalize the devastated economy of Lower Manhattan — has been largely accomplished.