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In a ceremony held last night, the Tribeca Film Festival announced this year's winners of its competition categories. The top prizes went to Iranian drama About Elly for Best Narrative Feature and audience fave Racing Dreams for Best Documentary Feature.

About Elly, written and directed by Asghar Farhadi, revolves around a group of "old college pals" who reunite for a weekend by the sea, a friendly outing that turns serious when one of the women disappears. The jury (Bradley Cooper, Richard Fischoff, Todd Haynes, Meg Ryan, and Uma Thurman) called the Iranian movie "a seamless piece of ensemble filmmaking." Racing Dreams, directed by Marshall Curry, follows three go-kart racers, ranging in age from 11 to 13, who are competing for a national champiomship that's considered "a huge stepping stone to auto racing's big show-NASCAR." The jury (Liz Garbus, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Whoopi Goldberg, Morgan Spurlock, and Brian Williams) declared it to be "a completely compelling, entertaining film of incredible quality."

For his Norwegian comedy North, director Rune Denstad Langlo was recognized as Best New Narrative Filmmaker, while Ciarán Hinds (The Eclipse) and Zoe Kazan (The Exploding Girl) were honored as Best Actor and Best Actress, respectively. In the documentary arena, Ian Olds won the award as Best New Documentary Filmmaker for Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi, which tells the story of an Afghan "fixer" (defined as "someone hired by foreign journalists to facilitate the gathering of news stories") and the "dangerous and unseen world of wartime news gathering." The recently-acquired Defamation received a Special Jury Mention.

The complete list of award winners is available at the official site. The festival continues through May 3. Check out all of our coverage right here.

My, my, the Tribeca Film Festival (TFF) has certainly grown up. It seems like it was born only yesterday, and already it's celebrating its eighth edition. This year's festivities got started on Wednesday evening with a "by invitation only" screening of Woody Allen's Whatever Works, the director's first NYC-based film in five years. Only a few members of the press were allowed to attend: three of the four reviews linked at Rotten Tomatoes were negative. Coincidence?

Deals. ESPN picked up TV rights to Jonathan Hock's documentary The Lost Son of Havana, according to indieWIRE, and will broadcast the film in August. The doc follows Luis Tiant, a Major League Baseball pitcher from 1964 to 1982, as he returns to his homeland of Cuba after 46 years of exile. Tiant once said: "We should never forget what has happened to the people in Cuba for forty years."

First Run Features acquired Yoav Shamir's Defamation, and plans a fall release. As reported by indieWIRE, "In the doc, Shamir embarks on a quest to answer the question 'What is anti-Semitism today?'" Ex-paratrooper Shamir previously made the excellent Checkpoint; when his latest debuted at the Berlin fest in February, Howard Feinstein in Screen International praised the director's "lighter approach," calling the film "a well-researched but unapologetically subjective essay."

Our Coverage. Public screenings began on Thursday afternoon, and our own Eric D. Snider caught The Swimsuit Issue, which is "about a group of ordinary men of varying ages and physiques who combine to create Sweden's first all-male synchronized swimming team." He observed: "Hard to believe this and Ingmar Bergman came from the same place." Eric also reviewed Fear Me Not, "a slow-burning psychological thriller" from Denmark, starring Ulrich Thomsen and Paprika Steen.

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