| Richard Peña | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1953 New York City, United States |
| Occupation | Film programme and festival director |
Richard Peña (born 1953) is the American film program director of the prestigious Film Society of Lincoln Center noted for his organization of the New York Film Festival, New Directors/New Films series and Scanners (formerly known as the New York Video Festival).
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Interested in film at a very young age, when Richard was just 12 years old, he was already attending the New York Film Festival, to view a rarely shown Erich von Stroheim movie.
Even as a boy, he has admitted that he was a passionate film buff, and this passion was sparked when he began attending Spanish language films with his grandparents at the Elgin Theater in Chelsea.
Two decades later, Peña helps choose the films that are featured at that prestigious festival. That's part of his role at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.
At Harvard University, Peña combined his love of film with his interest in Latin American culture. A son of Spanish and Puerto Rican parents, he spent a year in Rio de Janeiro for his senior thesis on Brazilian cinema and Argentine cinema.
After earning a master's degree in film at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Peña taught film at several colleges before joining the Film Center at the Art Institute of Chicago, eventually being named its director.
In 1988, now a film scholar he came to the Film Society of Lincoln Center.
Since then he has been also been film program director for the New York Film Festival. He has the power to overlook which films are shown at the festival on an annual basis, welcoming in world films and foreign language films which often wouldn't be allowed to appear in many other mainstream festivals.
At the Film Society, Richard Peña has organized retrospectives of Michelangelo Antonioni, Sacha Guitry, acclaimed Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, Robert Aldrich, Wojciech Has, Youssef Chahine, Yasujiro Ozu, and most recently Amitabh Bachchan, as well as major film series devoted to African, Taiwanese, Polish, Hungarian, Arab, Cuban and Argentine cinema.
In the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, Peña was involved in the controversy over Abbas Kiarostami, who was refused an immigration visa to attend the festival because of his middle-eastern roots. Peña had personally invited Kiarostami to the festival but his admission to the United States was repudiated. In the event Peña stated: "It's a terrible sign of what's happening in my country today that no one seems to realize or care about the kind of negative signal this sends out to the entire Muslim world"
From 2001 to 2002, Richard Peña was the host on the Sundance Channel's "Conversations in World Cinema, " on which he interviewed Harmony Korine among other leading filmmakers. Since 1996, he has organized together with Unifrance Film the annual "Rendez-Vous with French Cinema Today" program.
He is also an Associate Professor of Film at Columbia University, where he specializes in film theory and international cinema and founded the Columbia University MA program in Film Studies: History, Theory and Criticism (HTC). A priori the closing night gala screening of The Descendants at the 49th New York Film Festival, FSLC Board President Dan Stern announced that Mr Peña had decided to step down from his posts as the Film Society of Lincoln Center's Program Director and as the head of the NYFF Selection Committee. In a press release, Mr. Peña stated: “Heading into the fiftieth anniversary of the Festival, it seems a perfect time for a transition, both for me personally and for the organization. Working at the Film Society has been beyond a "dream come true," but in the years left me I would like to possibly explore other areas of interest, both within and beyond the cinema. I also feel that, like at any other cultural institution, change can be important, as it will bring in fresh ideas and approaches to lead the Film Society into its next fifty years.”
"Film transcends culture and borders in a way poetry and painting cannot"
"With film, you're seeing images, confronting situations, as if you were walking down the street," he says. "You discover a certain universality, as opposed to differences, among people."