The Show, and the Business, of Tribeca

There's no business like show business, and for all the show to be found at the Tribeca Film Festival — the dozens of premiere parties, this weekend's outdoor Drive-In events, next week's ASCAP Music Lounge — there's also plenty of business going on behind closed doors.

During the next three days, a program known as Tribeca All-Access will bring hundreds of industry players to the table to discuss how today's promising ideas can become tomorrow's Next Big Thing. A networking event designed to connect filmmakers from underrepresented communities — all sporting works at various states of development, from scripts to short films — with investors, distributors, and industry insiders who might be interested in helping to push the project forward, All-Access stands tall as the summer counterpoint to the IFP Market, which is held in Manhattan every autumn. The two events now represent perhaps the country's most important yearly workshops for independent directors, screenwriters, and documentarians to find and hobnob with the insiders holding the purse-strings.

In a watershed year for the program, two finished projects with "All-Access" beginnings are returning to Tribeca this year to make their big-screen premieres. The more prominent of the pair, the global break-dancing documentary "Planet B-Boy," will be the featured film at the Tribeca Drive-In on Saturday as the headliner of the festival's premiere event. "B-Boy," about the world of breakdancing and the intensity of an international b-dancing competition, came to the Tribeca All-Access program years ago, mostly as a concept for a documentary that had yet to be filmed.

"The All-Access program is a realistic program," said the event's organizer, Beth Janson, who this year sifted through about 400 projects seeking the exposure that All-Access can provide. "We understand that this is all about relationships, and by getting these people in touch with each other, sometimes it can turn into cash, but it's mostly about establishing those relationships which can lead to movies, broadcast, DVDs, who knows."

That is precisely what happened to director Benson Lee as he sought to turn the global concept behind "Planet B-Boy" into a feature documentary.

"In a financial sense, Tribeca wasn't all that helpful," Mr. Lee said, noting that he had to find private investors to help fund the principal photography of break-dancing competitions around the world. "But what was great was meeting some of the other filmmakers going through the same experiences, to have those people to talk to. And it also helped to forge these relationships with distributors so that this year, we stand out from the sea of films at the festival."

By contrast, this year's other All-Access alumnus, the documentary "Lillie & Leander: A Legacy of Violence," was borne almost entirely in conversations at Tribeca. When the director, Jeffrey Morgan, brought to the festival the story of a Southern community coping with the shocking discovery of a possible link between themselves and a history of racially charged murders, he was instantly connected with investors and producers intrigued by the prospect of what this investigation might yield. Ultimately he was offered development money by Court TV (which has since pulled out of the project), and today he finds himself returning with a finished film that, ideally, will eventually reach a mass audience.

"Without All-Access, this wouldn't have gotten made, it's that simple," Mr. Morgan said, reflecting on the sizable credit card debt he fell into before being connected with interested people at Tribeca. "It's a very special setting where you can have the meetings with people in the industry that you would have never had if you had just been cold-calling."

Although All-Access takes place mostly outside the public's view, it is perhaps one of the key building blocks to making the Tribeca Film Festival an essential industry destination and a counterargument to critics who scoff at the festival's overall growth rate and mainstream aspirations.

This year, amid closed-door screenings, readings, and meetings that will take place between April 25 and 29, 32 projects will be presented, all at different stages of development. Out of those, this year 11 are documentaries with only some preliminary footage, and the remaining works-in-progress are little more than scripts, brought to the festival by would-be filmmakers who think they have the keys to developing a great movie.

But those numbers only tell part of the story; they are the winning submissions from a mountain of hundreds that poured in from hopeful filmmakers around the world — a mix that Ms. Janson said is growing more diverse every year.

"We take all kinds of projects from all kinds of budget ranges," she said. "This year, we received a lot more independent projects. Last year we had more commercial projects and also several sports projects. But we're focused in both worlds — mainstream and independent — because the communities these filmmakers hail from, they are not very prevalent in the mainstream, big-budget world either."

What started as a smaller, locally minded program has exploded as the festival has gone from regional to national to international. Today, Ms. Janson presides over one of the top networking events of any film festival on the planet, and she has the vantage point of someone who is seeing the surge of independent filmmakers hoping to take the power away from the Hollywood establishment and spread it, through digital cameras and YouTube, among independent artists.

"You definitely see that digital democracy," she said. "But it also has a downside, since film studios now know that filmmakers can make it themselves and that they can decide later if they want to buy the project."

That means more hopefuls are having to go out there and do it themselves, that programs like All-Access are becoming that much more essential for cutting through the cluttered industry conversation.

"This is a great place to premiere for young filmmakers," Mr. Morgan said, comparing Tribeca to other festivals. "It's so young but it's come so far in a very short period of time. People are starting to call it the Sundance of the East."