By Diana Lee LaBrecque

Fun fact of the day: the part of downtown New York known as Tribeca got its name from where the area is located in relation to Canal Street and what the area looks like. Hence, the triangle below Canal is known as Tri-be-ca. It is also the location of the Tribeca Film Institute, the company founded by Robert De Niro in 2002. The Institute was formed for a number of reasons, but mostly to bring a higher sense of communal culture to the area post-9/11 and to bring both New Yorkers and non-New Yorkers back downtown. The annual Tribeca Film Festival is a large part of this process and in less than four years the Festival has brought over half a million people to downtown New York City to screen hundreds of films directed from everyone from Scorcese to Joe Shmoe. Other events that take place at the annual festival include panelists’ discussions, art gallery openings, free concerts, shows and family-friendly parades. All of these events and activities brought downtown by the Tribeca Film Institute have contributed close to $100 million to the local economy since Sept. 11. There are also several premier red carpet style galas, which is to be expected because, come on, it’s De Niro running the show.

This year, the Tribeca Film Festival took place from April 19 to May 1. And as a volunteer, I got to witness some of the events unfold first hand. Though I didn’t get to shout out “I heart Bobby De Niro” at one of the red carpets that were rolled out over the weeks, I was assigned to work in the Screening Department of the Festival.

My many duties included ripping ticket stubs, counting the audience members as they entered the screening and finally counting and recording more ticket stubs. I also worked at an information booth and can report that the most repeatedly asked question at this years Festival was, “Why isn’t there any free popcorn this year?” I came up with many answers, one being, “The man who usually makes and hands out the popcorn quit and is now spinning cotton candy.”

I was ‘paid’ for my three seven-hour shifts with movie vouchers. I saw two foreign films: Seven Dwarfs and Shutter. The latter is a horror film from Thailand. And at first I assumed I wasn’t going to be scared because I would be stuck reading subtitles the whole time and trying to figure out the plot. I was 100 percent wrong. I have never been so scared in my life. Something I learned about horror films: it doesn’t matter what language the dead chick crawling out from beneath the bed speaks. After seeing Shutter, I can honestly say that American directors don’t know how to make a scary flick. Seven Dwarves is a German comedy, which was dubbed in English. Before I saw this film I never really thought about German humor and how the Germans might have seen the whole story of Snow White. For example, it turns out that Snow White’s father, the ex-King, was one of the seven dwarves (who aren’t actually dwarf-size). Compared to American comedy, German comedy is more fast paced and witty, and their pop culture references aren’t randomly placed like ours is. If you want to find out how to volunteer at next year’s Tribeca Festival or to see what films were screened, go to the site: www.tribecafilmfestival.org.

So the fact that I got to view never-before-seen films for free and see Ron Howard come down an escalator made my trip to the triangle below Canal worth it and then some.