The sixth annual Tribeca Film Festival closed up shop yesterday with some 50 screenings spread out across Manhattan — from TriBeCa to Chelsea, the East Village to Hell’s Kitchen. And for the sixth time, it brought a close to a familiar debate about the festival’s focus, purpose, and success.

It’s safe to say that few film festivals have attracted so much attention in their first six years, a period in which most festivals struggle merely to tread water and manage the logistics of tickets, theaters, and film prints. But as it was built up around the national tragedy of the World Trade Center attacks and brought to the world’s attention through prominent mentions at the Academy Awards and elsewhere in the industry, Tribeca had anything but a typical infancy, and has grown into a childhood that is even more difficult to define.

So was this year’s Tribeca a success? To answer that, one must start with an even more basic question: What has the Tribeca Film Festival become?

Many ticket-holders had a clear opinion on the matter. “Wow, Tribeca meets Harlem,” marveled 25-year-old David Johnson, a Brooklyn resident who had traveled nearly an hour to reach the Cathedral of St. John the Divine at West112th Street for a special presentation of Paolo Cherchi Usai’s experimental opus “Passio.” “This thing just keeps getting bigger. Watch, we’re going to have to go to Westchester next year.”

But for Mr. Johnson and others, taking note of the event’s expansion was not meant as criticism. For his part, Mr. Johnson didn’t mind the amorphous program at this year’s festival, nor, for that matter, the lengthy subway ride. “Most film festivals aren’t really that surprising. Sure, there might be an interesting film or two, but they are all set up pretty much the same way. What’s fun about Tribeca is that every year, you pick up the program and there’s something new.”

Flipping through his program guide, he began going through the special programs, counting them on his hands: “ESPN, the Music Lounge, DJ Spooky, the Family Festival …”

Indeed, touring the festival during its 12-day run, it was impossible to ignore that vastly different constituencies have come to call Tribeca their own. Two weeks ago, couples and families were drawn through spotty weather to the World Financial Center in search of the rare outdoor Manhattan spectacle known as the Tribeca Drive-In. Last week, it was celebrity hounds who made the trip to Astoria in search of autographs and glimpses of the stars at the black carpet premiere of “Spider-Man 3.”

Later in the week, an eclectic music crowd went downtown fsor the ASCAP Music Lounge at the Canal Room; on Saturday, an endless parade of children and sports buffs descended on Tribeca for Saturday’s “Family Festival Street Fair” and “Sports Day” — another event that makes Tribeca unique in an expanding universe of film festivals.

While the movies themselves were the early talk of Tribeca — this year, discussions trended toward such brilliant films as Julie Delpy’s bittersweet romantic comedy “2 Days in Paris,” Jia Zhang-Ke’s solemn “Still Life,” and the festival’s award winners: Hofshat Kaits’s drama of religion and family, “My Father My Lord,” and Alex Gibney’s torture documentary, “Taxi to the Darkside” — the festival’s special events gradually came to overshadow the films during its jam-packed second week.

That’s a fact that has led some to fiercely criticize the film festival for losing sight of the Tribeca community and for losing its primary sense of purpose as a film event — a failure evidenced by the festival’s lack of prominent film sales during its first five years.

But setting the 2005 Oscar-nominated “Transamerica” aside, to which many continue to point as Tribeca’s most prominent title to date, organizers have made no secret about their desire to think bigger and broader, to look beyond TriBeCa in curating a citywide, multimedia event.

As the Tribeca community has been revitalized and the need to think in terms of post-September 11 aid has receded, the festival has aspired to reach more neighborhoods and a wider base of film fans. At the same time, while the festival remains overshadowed by the Toronto Film Festival (preferred by films aiming to launch their Oscar runs), the Sundance Film Festival (still the indie darling), and France’s Cannes Film Festival (still the highest platform from which to make the biggest splash), Tribeca has reached out to documentarians and other independent writers and directors seeking a stage to make their North American premieres, instilling the festival with a genuine purpose regarding promising filmmakers.

Talking to a handful of independent filmmakers who came to Tribeca with their projects, it’s clear that in only six years the festival has steadily climbed the list of the world’s most important places for up-and-comers to screen work in competition. And if the long lines for last week’s weekday screenings were any indicator, a sizable audience is indeed hungry for the kinds of films provided by an international festival, even if that audience has a street fair, a sports showcase, and a music lounge to distract it.

In a way, it’s ironic that the festival drew to a close this weekend with five screenings of Antonio Ferrera and Albert Maysles’s “The Gates,” which documented the long and arduous journey undertaken by artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude in bringing their Central Park artistic vision to life in 2005.

Much as these two artists were criticized for decades, derided for unconventional work with questionable relevance, so has the Tribeca Film Festival been a target for many of the same claims.

Yet the evidence of Tribeca’s success is not all that different from the evidence that supported the the Gates as a revelation during its limited Central Park run in 2005. When all was said and done, the people came in droves to see and discuss; the festival brought together a community that would not otherwise have shared the same experience. Some prefer the big-budget vision of New York on display in “Spider-Man 3” to the quieter ode to the city evoked in “The Gates,” and some flocked to see Donovan at the music lounge while others hopped the “1” Train to check out the experimental “Passio” uptown; either way, Tribeca offered a sense of life and excitement that is worth celebrating.

Forget what those New Yorkers were ultimately heading to see. It was in the seas of people that one could see living proof that the Tribeca Film Festival is fulfilling its original mission — that six years after that dismal day, the neighborhood, and for that matter the city, is doing just fine.