Sports features heavily this year at the Tribeca Film Festival, with 14 premier screenings of sports-related narrative and documentary films and a partnership with ESPN.

It was strange to be in this nation of sports lovers during the 2006 FIFA World Cup, an Englishman in New York as they say, where football, or soccer ('to-may-to'/to-mah-to) fever never really arrived. Still, in what some would say was an attempt...