If there’s a keynote performance at the 11th Annual Tribeca Film Festival, it may well be Abbie Cornish’s riveting portrayal of a Texas single mother who, desperate for money to regain custody of her son, haphazardly smuggles Mexican immigrants across the border.

Such leading roles don’t frequently come around for women, but this year’s Tribeca boasts a boatload of them. In David Riker’s The Girl, which will make its world premiere in competition at the festival, Cornish’s fraught, sweaty performance of a mother on the brink bears two more pervasive themes at the 2012 Tribeca: financial straits and overlapping worlds.

“It totally rebirthed me as an actor,” says Cornish, the Aussie actress of Bright Star and Limitless. ‘’It felt like it was the first time again. In making the film, I felt like it was the best I had ever been as an actor in all regards — as an actor, as a collaborator, as a human being.”

Source: Washington Post (click for full story)