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Top honors at the 17th annual Tribeca Film Festival have gone to Diane for the Founders Award for Best U.S. Narrative Feature, Smuggling Hendrix for Best International Narrative Feature, and Island of the Hungry Ghosts for Best Documentary Feature. On the acting side, Alia Shawkat won Best Actress in a U.S. Narrative Feature Film for Miguel Arteta’s Duck Butter, and Jeffrey Wright took the Best Actor honor for O.G.

First-time narrative director and writer Kent Jones (who is also the executive director of the New York Film Festival) won two prizes at Tribeca for Diane, and the film starring Mary Kay Place won three. Estelle Parsons, Andrea Martin, Deirdre O’Connell and Jake Lacy co-star in the film, about a widowed, altruistic seventysomething woman whose life is dictated by the needs of others, and who finds herself forced to look at her own identity.

Screenings of...

Former film commissioner at the Danish Film Institute appointed artistic director.

Mette Damgaard-Sørensen has been appointed as the new artistic director of New Danish Screen.

Damgaard-Sørensen has served as film commissioner at the Danish Film Institute and has worked as a script and development consultant on feature films and TV series.

Claus Ladegaard, head of production & development at the Danish Film Institute, commented: “Having met with talents in many contexts and in various media, Mette Damgaard-Sørensen will be an asset to the Danish Film Institute’s work with professional talent in film, television and trans-media.”

Damgaard-Sørensen succeeds Jakob Kirstein Høgel and is due to being on Sept 1 at the latest.

A panel of experts at Cph Pix say that the luxury of public support for Danish film may be inhibiting risktaking and creating a ‘monoculture’ on screen.

If you look in recent lineups of Berlinale Forum or Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, you see an absence of new Danish films. That’s despite the country’s film industry going through something of a golden age of international success from Love Is All You Need to The Hunt to A Royal Affair and Nymphomaniac, with one of the world’s best government-backed support systems for film.

So where are the ‘art’ films? That was the question posed at a panel on Thursday at the Cph Pix festival in Copenhagen.

Vinca Wiedemann [pictured], the widely respected producer who just became head of the National Film School of Denmark, noted that when she was the first artistic director of the Danish Film Institute’s New Danish Screen strand, which is engineered...