With almost three months to go before opening night, the Tribeca Film Festival launched a publicity blitz this morning designed to rehab the festival’s troubled image. Before a press release hyping lowered ticket prices and a concentration of venues landed in my inbox around 9:30 AM, I had already read two interviews with the festival’s co-executive director Nancy Schafer, in the New York Post and the New York Sun. Why this much media, and why now? Who knows. But as Schafer acknowledges in the Post story that her festival has to compete with SXSW for post-Sundance premieres, it might be reasonable to assume they wanted to make a little bit of noise the day before South By releases their full lineup and proceeds to commandeer the attention of a certain sector of the blogosphere for a month and a half. They may not have the films, but they sure do have the publicists!

Anyway: the big takeaway from all of this is that the Tribeca Film Festival is moving out of Tribeca. Well, not totally–there will still be screenings at Tribeca Cinemas, and at Pace University, which I don’t think actually counts as Tribeca anyway. But the festival was unable to secure screening rooms at the Battery Park multiplex that they’ve used as a primary festival venue for years. That screening center was difficult to get to and its layout sometimes made navigating public screenings a nightmare, but its close proximity to the World Trade Center site (in order to get to the theater from the subway, you actually have to cross a footbridge over Ground Zero) made it seem like a spiritual home for a festival that was ostensibly founded to resurrect that neighborhood’s post-9/11 economy.

And now? The Tribeca Film Festival will mostly take place in and around the East Village. And I guess we shouldn’t complain about it, because it’s convenient, and I kind of like the City Cinemas on 2nd Ave, especially the one auditorium with the crazy chandelier. But if they’re no longer even pretending like this festival is a charity mission, then it’s double super extra important that they concentrate on putting together a film slate with a much better good vs. garbage ratio than in years past.