Founded in 1963, as the auteur theory and European cinematic modernism were crashing on to the shores of American film culture, the New York Film Festival stands as the second-oldest film festival in North America, and one of the oldest in the world. As we count down to NYFF's historic 50th edition in 2012, the Film Society is proud to present a year-long retrospective of highlights from the festival's first 49 years, as curated by past and present members of the NYFF selection committee.

Featured Works:

The Hunt (Carlos Saura, 1966); 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967); The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1967); My Night at Maud's (Eric Rohmer, 1969); Kes (Ken Loach, 1969, pictured); L'amour fou (Jacques Rivette, 1969); The Debut (Gleb Panfilov, 1970); Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese, 1973)

Program information:

50 Years of the New York Film Festival

The Retrospective of the 62nd Berlin International Film Festival has rediscovered a legendary German-Russian film studio: Mezhrabpom-Film and its German branch Prometheus wrote film history from 1922 to 1936.

Moisei Aleinikov, a Russian film expert and producer from tsarist times who had a great instinct for the right topics, and Willi Münzenberg, a German communist and "red media entrepreneur," joined forces in 1922 to combine clever business ideas, a political mission and boundless enthusiasm for new cinematic narratives. And so the film studio Mezhrabpom-Rus (later called Mezhrabpom-Film), a unique German-Russian film venture, was set up in Moscow, with headquarters in Berlin.

After producing some 600 films, this international experiment was brutally ended eleven and fourteen years later by Hitler's and Stalin's regimes.

Featured Works:

Entitled "The Red Dream Factory", the Retrospective of the 2012 Berlinale will be dedicated to this studio rediscovered in Russian archives.

The Retrospective will present some 30 programs made up of over 40 silent and sound films. The silent films will all be accompanied by live music performed by renowned artists. The program includes diverse German premieres of films that are being made available by Gosfilmofond (Moscow) and the Russian State Documentary Film & Photo Archive at Krasnogorsk.

The film program will be accompanied by discussions and events at the Deutsche Kinemathek. Berlin's Bertz + Fischer will also be publishing a book for the Retrospective. In it, German and Russian authors will illuminate the development of the studio and the aesthetics of the films that were produced there.

In cooperation with Arte/ZDF, the Berlinale presents Sergei Eisenstein's classic Oktjabr (October, 1928). The film about the revolution in October of 1917 has written film history, particularly due to its crowd scenes. The Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra will accompany the screening on February 10th, 2012, at the Friedrichstadt-Palast with the original, reconstructed soundtrack by composer Edmund Meisel.

Program information:

Retrospective 2012: The Red Dream Factory

Established in 2001, MoMA's annual two-week showcase of recent nonfiction film and media takes place each February. This international selection of films presents a wide range of creative categories that extends the idea of the documentary form, examines the relationship between contemporary art and nonfiction filmmaking, and reflects on new areas of nonfiction practice.

Featured Works:

This year's festival includes both feature-length and short documentary films, a retrospective of works from Paper Tiger Television's 30 years of media activism, and a seminar on database documentary practices-an emergent form of interactive narrative and nonlinear filmmaking that employs computer and Web-based media. The majority of films in the festival are New York City premieres, and filmmakers will be present at most screenings. Special off-site events take place at Light Industry in Greenpoint, Brooklyn (Centerpiece), and at Nitehawk Cinema in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (Closing Night).

Program information:

Documentary Fortnight 2012: MoMA's International Festival of Nonfiction Film and Media