Baseball films take center stage at Tribeca Film Festival this weekend

They're holding the annual Tribeca Film Festival in New York this weekend and a pair of baseball movies are holding spots among the screenings. There's "Knuckleball!" which features the ubiquitous pitch and the men who throw it. Then there's a "Baseball In The Time of Cholera," the Olivia Wilde-produced film about a young Haitian ballplayer in the middle of the country's recent cholera outbreak.

While "Knuckleball!" looks like a good movie and has been generating some excitement in the blogosphere, I'm a little more interested to see "Baseball In The Time Of Cholera." Though it may not be all about baseball, it definitely looks like a much more important film. You can answer that age-old question — "Why are there no major leaguers from Haiti?" — just by viewing the country's devastation in the 2 1/2-minute long trailer.

But as the clip also shows, it's not like baseball is not being played by children in the country and the universal and hopeful nature of those images really bring a haunting juxtaposition to the brutal reality of living there. It looks like an emotional roller coaster of a movie, but one that will be worth tracking down once it hits a wider release.

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