Hollywood comedy The Five-Year Engagement opened New York’s Tribeca Film Festival bringing laughter and red carpet glamour to the event before audiences settle into 12 days of mostly independent cinema.

The overall programme reflects a range of films from around the world

The romance starring Jason Segel and Emily Blunt, made by the same team behind the screen hit Forgetting Sarah Marshall, kicked off the festival which is entering its second decade that promises a broad range of films from across the world.

Mr Segel and Ms Blunt hit the red carpet for the movie in which they portray a couple discovering each other during a never-ending engagement.

The film is directed by Nicholas Stoller, who co-wrote the script with Mr Segel.

The pair first teamed up on the 2008 blockbuster Marshall.

Mr Segel described the movie as “a lean mean comedy machine”, and joked that, like his previous comedies, there were again plenty of scenes of himself naked in strange situations. “Sadly, sadly there is, yes,” he said.

Ms Blunt said another film in which she stars at Tribeca, Your Sister’s Sister, is far different from the comedy opposite Mr Segel, whom she said was a good pal.

“This is a big raucous comedy and the other one is a tiny movie all improvised and made for no money. We shot it in 12 days – they are very diverse, which at least is a good thing,” she said.

The film’s producer Judd Apatow, actress Olivia Wilde, comic actresses Amy Poehler and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, documentary maker Michael Moore, and the festival’s co-founder Robert De Niro also attended the opening, held not far from Central Park.

Mr de Niro helped set up the festival as a way to revive downtown Manhattan after the September 11 attacks and many of the screenings are still held there.

This year, Tribeca will screen 89 feature films split between 57 fiction and 32 documentaries, including 50 world premieres.

It is the first year Tribeca organisers selected debut night films for the narrative and documentary competitions.

Organisers said the overall programme reflects a range of films from around the world.

Half of the festival’s line-up of 12 fiction films in competition are international productions.