NICOLE KIDMAN AND SEAN PENN STAR IN LATEST FROM FILMMAKER SYDNEY POLLACK
A special premiere of Universal Pictures’/Working Title Films’ thriller The Interpreter—the latest from Academy Award®- winning director Sydney Pollack and Oscar® winners Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn—is slated to open the fourth annual Tribeca Film Festival, with a screening at Manhattan’s Ziegfeld Theater on April 19. The screening will be held in association with the United Nations, whose officials allowed unprecedented access to Pollack, his cast and crew, marking The Interpreter as the first motion picture to ever film inside the headquarters of the worldfamous organization.
First held in 2002, the Tribeca Film Festival presented by American Express was founded by Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal and Craig Hatkoff to celebrate New York City as a major filmmaking center and to contribute to the long-term recovery of lower Manhattan. The mission of the Tribeca Film Festival is to enable the international film community and the general public to experience the power of film by redefining the film festival experience. “We’re proud to open our festival with Sydney Pollack’s new film The Interpreter,” said Robert De Niro, co-founder of the Tribeca Film Festival. “It is especially significant to us since it was filmed here in New York at the United Nations.” “We’re thrilled to be working with Sydney Pollack and Universal Pictures and honored to premiere The Interpreter at the fourth annual Tribeca Film Festival,” said Festival co-founder Jane Rosenthal.
From Academy Award® winner Sydney Pollack, the director behind some of the most compelling and provocative thrillers of the last two decades (Three Days of The Condor, Absence of Malice, The Firm), comes a fresh take on contemporary suspense: an intricate, knife’s-edge drama that unfolds against our 21st Century world of international terror and inside the United Nations’ hidden corridors of power. Academy Award® winners Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn star in The Interpreter, the story of two opposite people who unexpectedly collide within a maze of mounting paranoia, personal secrets and explosive global events. Shot on location in Manhattan and Southern Africa, The Interpreter is the first motion picture in history to receive inside access to the United Nations’ headquarters (which is officially international territory) in New York.

The escalating events begin when African-born U.N. translator Silvia Broome (Kidman) alleges that she has overheard a death threat against an African head of state, spoken in a rare dialect few people other than Silvia can understand. With the words “The Teacher will never leave this room alive,” in an instant, Silvia’s life is turned upside down as she becomes a hunted target of the killers. Placed under the protection of federal agent Tobin Keller (Penn), Silvia’s world only grows more nightmarish. As Keller digs deeper into his eyewitness’ past and her secretive world of global connections, the more suspicious he becomes that she herself might involved in the conspiracy. With every step of the way, he finds more reasons to mistrust her.