THE WAY SOME of this country's correspondents reported it, the red carpet was fraying, the champagne was flat, and the buzz along the Croisette was at a scandalously low hum. At Cannes the film of the moment was Lars von Trier's joyfully anti-America (but only the "America ... in my head," he assured the Associated Press) Dogville. If you consider that, just a few days earlier, in New York City a film festival suspiciously invented in 2002 was capturing the attention of the paparazzi, you might come to the conclusion that the Central Intelligence Agency has taken an interest in the film festival circuit.

Why make that transatlantic journey to bask in the sun and hear the grousings of one lousy Vincent Gallo when you can ship yourself to the Tribeca Film Festival, where you can watch films within the walls of one nightmarishly mall-like multiplex, with elevators carrying you straight up to umpteen theaters whose lobbies feature gigantic views of America's most compelling tourist attraction: the ditch where the twin towers once stood. Why, indeed.

Scratch the surface of Tribeca and you find yet more oddities. It happens to be the lily pad where former San Francisco International Film Festival director Peter Scarlet landed after leaving Cinematheque Française and carrying the very first reels to audiences in a "liberated" Afghanistan. Actually, Scarlet's humanist influence could be deeply felt in the programming, particularly in its wide-ranging aggregations of challenging movies from Iran and Iraq – from Iranian New Yorker Amir Naderi's Marathon to Saad Salman's Baghdad On/Off to Maziar Bahari's And Along Came a Spider – a stark contrast to the paranoid security that descended on the festival like a storm cloud. So omnipresent were the police and buff, suited gentlemen with wires sticking out of their tight jackets that they were almost as titillating as the incredible peep-show installation supplied by Guy Maddin ("Cowards Bend the Knee") in the lobby of festival HQ. But security was not there to protect audiences. They were there to protect celebrities from audiences – and there were many celebs to be found, spotted with or without pancake makeup, in their natural habitat: Al Pacino, Julian Schnabel, Cyndi Lauper. Such were the photo-op moments that one industry insider jokingly groused to me, "Tribeca's just about the celebrities and the parties – that's why I'm going to Cannes."

If Cannes did seem serious, Tribeca had one celebrity moment not to be missed. After a shorts program that varied from incredulous (a very unfunny 20-minute featurette on a pet mortuary that looked like it was made by a class of sixth graders) to giddy (Jay Rosenblatt's "I Used to Be a Filmmaker," which places ironic intertitle puns over scenes of his baby daughter's milestones), Speed Levitch (famous as the double-decker tour guide star of nonfiction character comedy The Cruise and now in Richard Linklater's short on the World Trade Center site, "Live from Shiva's Dance Floor") offered a personal tour of the Screening Room's neighborhood, during which the vividly motormouthed autodidact genius and purposeful malapropster mused that "Mother Nature considers New York City a great triumph of herself." His vision of what the WTC site should be? A pasture for a few symbolic bison wiped out by America's manifest destiny. As Linklater recorded him saying it, "Let ground zero become a joy park of spontaneous culture, a living memorial, a landmark with a heartbeat."

One kept thinking about the best quotes from Levitch as the festival continued ("What is a nervous breakdown but an electrolysis of learning?"). Many in the audience had their own electrolysis of learning at a screening of the deceptively sweet documentary Sunset Story, in which a nonagenarian and her spry octogenarian friend spend their final days in a rest home for freethinkers, doing what comes naturally: arguing, protesting in the streets, complaining about the food, and coming to terms with the end. With a profound reimagining of the meaning and consequence of old age wrapped in a gentle comedy that leaves room for the viewer, the filmmakers (producer Caroline Libresco, former San Francisco Jewish Film Festival programmer, now at the Sundance Film Festival, and whom I've known for years, and coproducer Eden H. Wurmfeld, who left San Francisco and went on to produce Kissing Jessica Stein and Swingers, and director Laura Gabbert, who produced Lisanne Skyler's Getting to Know You) hit a vein.