The Discovery, Narrative and Documentary competition lineups for the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival have been announced, and as indieWIRE reports, it’s going to be a much smaller festival this year. This would seem like good news: last year, Tribeca was streamlined down to 100-something features, and as I noted in my festival recap, the quality of the programming hardly suffered. Here are some of the films that, on first scan of the lineup, I’m excited to see:

• About Elly — This Iranian drama won the Silver Bear at last month’s Berlinale, and amongst its more controversial competition, Elly was a critical favorite. Likening it to an Iranian L’Avventura, Kevin Lee noted at The Auteurs Notebook that “the film suggests a post-Kiarostami Iranian cinema capable of achieving much within a mainstream idiom.”
• The Exploding Girl — Another Berlin premiere, this narrative directed by Bradley Rust Gray (husband of Treeless Mountain creator So Yong Kim) stars Zoe Kazan as a “Cherubic college student” whose “relationship with her boyfriend slowly disintegrates via cell phone.”
• Outrage — the latest doc from Oscar nominee Kirby Dick is said to offer “a searing indictment of the hypocrisy of closeted politicians who actively campaign against the LGBT community they covertly belong to.”
• Con Artist — I’d ordinarily be wary of anything described as a “punk-fueled docu-comedy,” but Tribeca has an excellent track record when it comes to art docs, so I’ll give this nonfiction portrait of Mark Kostabi a shot.
• Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench — I’ve heard a few good words on the street about Damien Chazelle’s debut feature, described as a “black-and-white, verite-style relationship drama with all that jazzy romance of an old-Hollywood musical.”
• P-Star Rising – Director Gabriel Noble spent four years following hip hop producer/ex-con Jesse Diaz and his young daughter Priscilla, an aspiring rapper who also goes by the name P-Star.

The same day that I wrote my post about the attack on Michael Moore, Gregg Kilday of the Risky Biz blog caught up with Moore on the phone. Here’s a bit from the resulting post, Moore Comes Out Swinging:

…Moore, never one to shy away from a righteous fight, isn’t playing defense. I talked with him by phone Sunday night–I was in Cannes and he was in New York, putting the final touches on his film–and he displayed his usual mix of passion, outrage, humor and bravado. “Why would they do it now? I have no idea,” he said of the government maneuver. “Were they just sitting around there and somebody said, ‘Hey, this is opening in Cannes next week. We have to do something.’ Are they that divorced from reality or the popular culture to know that isn’t the right thing to do? I think maybe they thought, ‘We’re going to chance it here to try to paint him with some Castro brush or whatever.’ I think when people see the film, there is going to have to be a lot of rewriting done on the initial stories that went out last week in terms of what really happens in the film and what we really did.”

Daniel Schechter’s number one goal in his films is to get people talking about issues. It seems to work. Last night, after the screening of his newest film, In Debt We Trust, people couldn’t stop talking. Schechter says it’s because the film’s topic–the alarming problem of credit card debt and consumption in America–is one everyone gets. Like the best political documentaries, In Debt We Trust does its job when it comes to getting people talking and thinking and even doing something about the problem. Although the topic is sobering–even depressing and alarming–Schechter uses humor and an amusing original soundtrack to ease us through the message.

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