Go Kart Doc Set To Win Tribeca Audience Award?

A scene from Marshall Curry's "Racing Dreams." Image courtesy of the Tribeca Film Festival.

The Tribeca Film Festival’s website has a page that features the current standings for this year’s Heineken Audience Award.  The tally currently includes votes for all screenings through Tuesday, and it seems Marshall Curry’s “Racing Dreams” is the current frontrunner to take the prize (the presence of the tally makes it all a little anti-climatic, no?).  The film - about kids who compete for the World Karting Association’s national championship, a huge stepping stone to NASCAR - screened to a five minute standing ovation last weekend, with execs from Fox Searchlight, Magnolia, and Sheila Nevins from HBO all in the audience. 

If the film does win, it will mark Curry’s second film to take the prize (after 2005’s “Street Fight”), and will mark the sixth documentary in a row to do so (2003’s “Together” was the last narrative film to win).  It seems extremely likely that a documentary will take the prize either way, with four of the top six current vote-getters docs (Gabriel Noble’s “P-Star Rising,” Beadie Finzi’s “Only When I Dance,” Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman’s “Soundtrack For a Revolution,” and “Dreams”) documentaries, while another - Ron Carlson’s “Midgets vs. Mascots” - though a narrative feature, is filmed as a mockumentary. 

Other top vote getters include Sharon Maymon and Erez Tadmor’s “A Matter of Size,” Måns Herngren’s “The Swimsuit Issue,” Yojiro Takita’s Academy Award winner “Departures,” Nicole Opper’s “Off and Running” (also a doc), and Jac Schaeffer’s “TiMER.”

The Audience Award winner will be announced Saturday night. Check back with indieWIRE tonight for the winners of all the juried prizes.

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posted on April 30, 2009 |Share