Content area
Full text
VOA English Service
DATELINE: New York
The Fifth annual Tribeca Film Festival has opened in New York. For the first time, the massive festival will show films dealing with the event that led to its creation: the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Actor Robert DeNiro and two associates started the film festival just months after the attacks to reinvigorate the Tribeca neighborhood, just north of the World Trade Center. Mr. De Niro was born nearby and has business interests, including a restaurant, in the area.
The Festival opened Tuesday evening with United 93, a film that recounts the events aboard the airplane that crashed into a Pennsylvania field after passengers prevented the hijackers from hitting their target. It has been a controversial choice, but Robert De Niro thinks it was also an obvious choice."
"Flight 93, if it was not opening the festival, it would seem strange," he said. "You cannot not be touched by it. It is a very, very good movie and very direct, simple. I think it is important to see because it is kind of a playback of what happened."
The topic is still so sensitive that the debut of United...