By Maria Esteves – April 18, 2016

The 15thTribeca Film Festival 2016 (TFF16) First Annual Whoopi’s Shorts Program introduced by festival co-founder Jane Rosenthal commenced Sunday, April 17, at the Tribeca Festival Hub in New York. The eight captivating films that inaugurated the animated shorts program were Fear, directed by Dawn Dreyer and Andrea Love; I am a Pencil (Je suis un crayon), directed by Joe D’Arcy; The Loneliest Stoplight, directed by Bill Plympton; Lucens, directed by Marcel Barelli; The Orchestra, directed by Mikey Hill; Shiny, directed by Daniel Cloud Campos; The Short Story of the Fox and a Mouse, directed by Camille Chaix; and Violet, directed by Maurice Joyce, narrated by Aidan Gillen.

The Q&A session immediately followed curated by Whoopi Goldberg with director Mikey Hill, co-writer Jennifer Smith, The Orchestra; crew member Will, The Loneliest Stoplight; directors Dawn Dreyer and Andrea Love, Fear; director Maurice Joyce, Violet (http://bcove.me/ttam2j4p); directors Joe and Carol D’Arcy, I am a Pencil. Questions posed to filmmakers by Goldberg included: "Why did you make this film? Where did the idea come from? How did this collaboration came?"

TFF16 First Annual Whoopi’s Shorts: (L-R) directors Joe and Carol D’Arcy, I am a Pencil,
director Maurice Joyce, Violet, director Andrea Love and Dawn Dreyer, Fear.