New York: Affordable Art Fair, Spring 2019  There is a growing fascination in in art created outside the boundaries of established pathways; works of art that can be classified as ordinary art, outsider art or art brut. This art is often shaped by individuals who have no formal training and innovate through their intuition. Personal taste and spontaneity are their only guides. A relatively large number of these works were part of the spring 2019 Affordable Art Fair and with some pieces p...

The annual New York Indian Film Festival, North America’s longest-running Indian Film Festival, now in its 19th edition, will be held from May 7-12. NYIFF will premiere the latest feature films, documentaries and shorts from India including award winning releases and showcases for numerous regional movies with a special emphasis on films from Bengal, which  for 9 of the 19 regional productions.  Three feature length docum...

Established by Nora Armani in 2011, and serving as SRFF's artistic director,  Armani  has defined the mission of this small festival. SRFF shows productions which “address socially relevant topics in an entertaining manner” with the goal of reaching a larger audience while avoiding the pitfalls of commercial films with their violence and frequent disregard of basic human rights. For its sixth edition, the focus was set on the life of  women and children...

The 8th annual Winter Film Awards International Film Festival was held this year from February 19th to the 23rd.  The fest offered an expanded and diversified program with an official selection of 92 short and feature length films from 34 countries.  685 productions had been submitted from 60 countries, exceeding the submissions for the preceding two festivals. The proportion of selected productions 60 minutes and longer increased. The festival uniquely appeals to emerging filmm...

Held from February 21st to the 28th at  MoMA, The Museum of Modern Art, the 18th edition of Doc Fortnight presented 17 documentary features, continuing its annual program of the best innovative international nonfiction films.  Except for one film from 2017 and one from 2019, the productions selected were from 2018.  Most of the films chosen were directed by female film makers and covered universal issues including stories from the Middle East, Latin America, Asia, Europe, and th...

The 28th annual New York Jewish Film Festival was presented by the Jewish Museum and the Film Society of Lincoln Center from January 9 – 22. Among the more than 70 Jewish film festivals held in North America each year, the NYJFF is the largest and among the oldest. NYJFF is perfectly situated in a city where as of 2016 more than 1.1 million Jews live, amounting to 12 % of the total population. Among the NYJFF innovations provided this year are a new annual p...

The 27th edition of the Outsider Art Fair (OAF) was held at the Metropolitan Pavilion from January 17-20 with more than 2,500 attendees at the opening of the fair. The fair mostly featured  North American and international artists working in the  tradition of raw art (originally called Brut by Jean Dubuffet),  self-taught art,  spontaneous creativity, and productions created outside of established networks of distribution and instruction.  67 exhibi...

  Decades ago the distinguished German philosopher Juergen Habermas identified in a seminar in New York as one of the principle problems of advanced industrial society its inability to develop  a plausible belief system or renew an existing one which provides motivating symbols and is grounded in interpersonal communication. Its absence can certainly be noted when observers of conflicts with radical movements often labeled as terrorist deplore our vacuum of ideas which could overcom...

The largest and probably most prestigious North American documentary film festival was held from November 8-15 in New York City featuring 135 feature-length documentaries, including 42 world premieres, in its program of 312 films. They covered a broad thematic range in 21 sections that included local, regional and global issues, with a strong focus on problems faced by contemporary societies. 2,000 films were submitted to the festival and hundreds more documentaries were screened for possible ...

  THE LAST RESORT is a compelling documentary by Dennis Scholl and Kareen Tabsch. The film presents the  photographic work of Andy Sweet and Gary Monroe and  includes backstories about their lives. It is a persuasive study of the Jewish community in Florida’s South Beach. With background documentation and superb use of the extensive visual records of the Jewish community taken during the seventies by Sweet and Monroe in  color and black and white respectively, T...

  In a period when politicians openly disregard the truth and the rise of embrace authoritarian rule around the globe constraining public opinion,  important documentaries can have a difficult time overcoming the informational noise and finding their most essential audience while competing with other documentaries’ that cover equally disturbing problems.  INVISIBLE HANDS, a USA production by Shraysi Tandon belongs to the relatively small group of must see 2...

  The 12th annual Other Israel Film Festival was held from November 1-8 at the Manhattan Jewish Community Center (JCC) with additional screenings at three other venues. The JCC is the home of the Carole Zabar Center for film and serves as an essential resource for Israeli films and its expanding film industry ing the distribution of Jewish and Israeli themed productions. It provides a streaming platform for film and television programs, organizes the Other Israel film festival, an...

With an excellent reputation among the numerous documentary film festivals in the New York metropolitan area, The Margaret Mead Film Festival, held from October 18-21 at the American Museum of Natural History, delivered once again an outstanding program of 55 productions from 39 countries. There where 18 premieres and numerous special events and performances. The festival received 500 submissions, and including the solicited films reviewed, about 800. Drawing an audience primarily from Manhatt...

    Held from September 28 – October 14 by the Film Society of Lincoln Center  the New York Film Festival continued to expand in its 56th edition an extensive program covering more themes, filmmaking approaches, and emerging production technologies with each edition.  Over past decades the festival has carved out a significant role as a curator for the most important domestic and international films. NYFF introduced a savvy New York cinephile audience to a film worl...

The proliferation of independent art fairs is creating a small constrained market for young artists. This market has not been impacted by the boon in the international global art market driven by investments which in 2017 generated close to $64 billion, an annual increase of 12%, and is generally considered to be a better investment than stocks, antiques, jewelry or gold.   Four out of five artworks bought at auction go into storage for future sale. Unfortunately, art does not provid...

With the rapid expansion of new viewing technologies, specifically the streaming of feature films and series which in the United States now has about 160 million individuals subscribing to Netflix and Amazon Prime and millions more to many other streaming services, television is continuing to enjoy a golden age. Virtually all past and present television programs can now be transmitted. The variety of Television programs and how they can be watched are constantly expanding.  Only a tiny fr...

Asian CineVision presented the 41st edition of the Asian American International Film Festival (AAIFF) from July 25 – August 5 at the Village East Cinema and the Asia Society. This  community oriented unique film festival  is the premier with a comprehensive focus on Asian and Asian-American films and selected this year 80 productions from over 14 countries.  The relevance of the festival for the Asian American community is reflected in a record number o...

Japan Cuts 2018, the festival of New Japanese Films was held from July 19-29 at New York’s Japan Society having grown into the largest United States event for contemporary Japanese cinema with a selection of 30 films of which most were premiering in North America. The program included 27 feature films, 3 documentaries, classic films, the experimental spotlight and Q&A sessions for most films with 14 guest appearances. The Cut Above award for outstanding performance in film was bestow...

One of the most popular international film festivals, the New York Asian Film Festival (NYAFF), was held by Subway Cinema and the Film Society of Lincoln Center at Manhattan’s Walter Reade Theater and the SVA theatres from June 29 – July 15. It has retained its prominent position as the leading festival in the United States for popular Asian films. Held now for 17 years NYAFF was started by Subway Cinema to present the most entertaining and strangest movies ranging from blockbuster...

                       Established in 1978, Human Rights Watch (HRW) is an independent international organization headquartered in New York with a global staff of more than 400 professionals including 80 researchers and a large number of human rights experts, lawyers, academics and media professionals. Main HRW offices are located in major Western cities but also in Nairobi, Tokyo and Moscow ed by field offices in Eastern Euro...

Presented by the Museum of the Moving Image and the Czech Center at the Bohemian National Hall the Panorama Europe Film Festival was held for the tenth time from May 4th to the 31st covering outstanding recent European fiction and documentary productions, with most of them being shown in New York City for the first time. Of the 17 productions shown 14 were made from 2016 – 18.  The films selected included a master piece of filmmaking, the digitally...

Held from May 2-6 on Randall’s Island with two preview days the 2018 Frieze Art Fair has added in its seventh edition new sections and programs solidifying its position in the international art world. The importance of Frieze is further demonstrated by plans to hold a Frieze Fair in 2019 in Los Angeles. This  reflects the significant share of the international art market that is dominated by buyers from the United States which  for about 42% of t...

The Tribeca Film Festival has a well established reputation for presenting outstanding documentaries in its program and excelled again in this year’s edition.  43 feature length documentaries were shown in four sections, the Documentary Competition, Spotlight Documentary, Viewpoints, and Special Screening. Close to half of the documentaries were produced by women film makers and first-time directors, a proportion that also held for narrative, international and U.S. films. ...

Known for its cutting-edge demonstrations of new story telling technologies and an outstanding selection of feature length productions in which documentaries often prevail, the 2018 edition of the Tribeca film festival was held from April 18 – 29.  It has greatly expanded its program with new innovative segments since its founding in 2002. In the first edition 1,300 productions were submitted of which 116 films and 36 short films were featured in the program. In 2018 there were...

From April 6-12 the  New York based German independent film festival presented its fifth edition with nine features and the next generation’s short film section including five premieres. A non-film component of the program were two episodes of the widely acclaimed German six-part thriller series Bad Banks which has been acquired by numerous countries apparently including the large US streaming site  Hulu. As in past years, Bertelsmann, the huge German media corpo...