 | This article is an autobiography or has been extensively edited by the subject or by someone connected to the subject.(March 2020) |
Karen Cooper | |
|---|---|
| Occupation | President and director of Film Forum |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Smith College |
Karen Cooper is the president and director of the New York City-based independent, nonprofit cinema Film Forum.
Karen Cooper has served as director of Film Forum since 1972, presiding over the growth of the nonprofit Manhattan movie house from a 50-seat screening room to its present-day incarnation: a four-screen cinema, located in lower Manhattan. Today considered one of America's leading venues for new American independent and foreign art house features, [1] Cooper oversees programming and selects premieres for Film Forum alongside associate Mike Maggiore. [2] [3] The theater is also renowned for its international and domestic repertory programming, curated by Bruce Goldstein.
Under Cooper, Film Forum introduced the early films of New German Cinema filmmakers Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, and Werner Herzog in the 1970s. [4] The 1980s saw Cooper bringing such documentaries as The Atomic Cafe and Henry Hampton's Eyes on the Prize to the theater's screens. In the pursuing decades, various films and documentaries have been presented by Cooper to Film Forum and New York audiences at large, by such filmmakers as Allison Anders, Chris Marker, Albert Maysles, Bruce Weber, and Asghar Farhadi. [3] [5] Recently, Film Forum premiered Maren Ade's Toni Erdmann and Raoul Peck's I Am Not Your Negro, both of which were nominated at the 89th Academy Awards.
In addition to her work at Film Forum, Cooper has served as juror at film festivals worldwide, including those in Naples, Morelia (Mexico), Oberhausen, Leipzig, Vancouver, Sarajevo, Amsterdam, and Copenhagen. She has also served on funding panels for the National Endowment on the Arts, the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, and the NYS Council on the Arts. She is the recipient of Brandeis University's Citation for Film, the New York Film Critics Special Award for Programming, New York Women in Film's MUSE Award and the Municipal Art Society's Certificate of Merit. In 2010, the Museum of Modern Art paid tribute to Cooper with Karen Cooper Carte Blanche: 40 Years of Documentary Premieres at Film Forum. [6]
A graduate of Smith College, Cooper received an Honorary Doctorate from the American Film Institute in 1995. [7] She is a longtime resident of Greenwich Village and is married to George Griffin, an experimental animator.
A film festival is an organized, extended presentation of films in one or more cinemas or screening venues, usually in a single city or region. Increasingly, film festivals show some films outdoors. Films may be of recent date and, depending upon the festival's focus, can include international and domestic releases. Some film festivals focus on a specific filmmaker, genre of film, or on a subject matter. Several film festivals focus solely on presenting short films of a defined maximum length. Film festivals are typically annual events. Some film historians, including Jerry Beck, do not consider film festivals as official releases of the film.
Werner Herzog is a German film director, screenwriter, author, actor, and opera director, regarded as a pioneer of New German Cinema. His films often feature ambitious protagonists with impossible dreams, people with unusual talents in obscure fields, or individuals in conflict with nature. His filmmaking process includes disregarding storyboards, emphasizing improvisation, and placing the cast and crew into similar situations as characters in his films.
The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) is the world's largest documentary film festival held annually since 1988 in Amsterdam. Over a period of twelve days, it has screened more than 300 films and sold more than 250,000 tickets. Visitors to the festival have increased from 65,000 in 2000 to 285,000 in 2018.
The LA Film Festival was an annual film festival that was held in Los Angeles, California, and usually took place in June. It showcased independent, international, feature, documentary and short films, as well as web series, music videos, episodic television and panel conversations.
The Thessaloniki International Film Festival (TIFF), organized by the cultural institution of the same name under the auspices of the Greek Ministry of Culture, is held every November in Thessaloniki.TIFF features international competition sections, and its program includes tributes to major filmmakers and national cinemas, as well as sidebar events such as masterclasses, exhibitions, live concerts and workshops. In addition to TIFF, its parent cultural institution holds the annual Thessaloniki Documentary Festival (TDF) in March.
Film Forum is a nonprofit movie theater at 209 West Houston Street in Greenwich Village, Manhattan. It began in 1970 as an alternative screening space for independent films, with 50 folding chairs, one projector and a $19,000 annual budget. Karen Cooper became director in 1972. Its current Greenwich Village cinema was built in 1990. Film Forum is a 4-screen cinema open 365 days a year, with 280,000 annual admissions, nearly 500 seats, 60 employees, 4500 members and an operating budget of $5 million. Film Forum is the only autonomous nonprofit cinema in New York City and one of the few in the United States of America. In 1994, Film Forum was honored with a Village Award by the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, even though it is technically in Soho. In 2018, Film Forum had a major renovation, adding new seats and a fourth theater.
The Thessaloniki Documentary Festival (TDF) is an international documentary festival held every March in Thessaloniki, Greece. TDF, founded in 1999, features competition sections and ranks among the world's leading documentary festivals. Since 2018, TDF is one of the 28 festivals included in the American Academy of Motion Picture, Arts and Sciences Documentary Feature Qualifying Festival List. TDF is organized by the Thessaloniki Film Festival cultural institution, which further organizes the annual Thessaloniki International Film Festival, held every November. French producer Elise Jalladeu is TDF's general director; film critic Orestes Andreadakis serves as its director.
The Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival is the largest documentary festival in North America. The event takes place annually in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The 27th edition of the festival took place online throughout May and June 2020. In addition to the annual festival, Hot Docs owns and operates the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema, administers multiple production funds, and runs year-round screening programs including Doc Soup and Hot Docs Showcase.
The Bleecker Street Cinema was an art house movie theater located at 144 Bleecker Street in Manhattan, New York City, New York. It became a landmark of Greenwich Village and an influential venue for filmmakers and cinephiles through its screenings of foreign and independent films. It closed in 1990, reopened as a gay adult theater for a short time afterward, then again briefly showed art films until closing for good in 1991.
Tala Hadid is a film director and producer. She is also a photographer. Her work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, The Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, The Smithsonian National Museum, The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington D.C., L'Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris and other locations.
The Sundance Film Festival is an annual film festival organized by the Sundance Institute. It is the largest independent film festival in the United States, with more than 46,660 attending in 2016. It takes place each January in Park City, Utah; Salt Lake City, Utah; and at the Sundance Resort, and acts as a showcase for new work from American and international independent filmmakers. The festival consists of competitive sections for American and international dramatic and documentary films, both feature films and short films, and a group of out-of-competition sections, including NEXT, New Frontier, Spotlight, Midnight, Sundance Kids, From the Collection, Premieres, and Documentary Premieres.
Lynne Sachs is an American experimental filmmaker and poet living in Brooklyn, New York. Her moving image work ranges from documentaries, to essay films, to experimental shorts, to hybrid live performances. Working from a feminist perspective, Sachs weaves together social criticism with personal subjectivity. Her films embrace a radical use of archives, performance and intricate sound work. Between 2013 and 2020, she collaborated with musician and sound artist Stephen Vitiello on five films.
ACEFEST is a film festival first held in 2007 in New York City. The festival focuses purely on showcasing domestic films "in an effort to strengthen and promote pride in American independent cinema".
The Quad Cinema is New York City's first small four-screen multiplex theater. Located at 34 West 13th Street in Greenwich Village, it was opened by entrepreneur Maurice Kanbar, along with his younger brother Elliott S. Kanbar in October 1972. It has been described as "one of the oldest independent cinemas in the city" and "a vibrant center for art house films."
Andrei Severny is a contemporary filmmaker, screenwriter, photographer and visual artist. Severny's films include Buried Seeds, Inside Risk: Shadows of Medellin, Gravitation: Variation in Time and Space, Condition, Teaching to See, Disparaît, v and Tom on Mars.
Directors Lounge is an ongoing Berlin-based film and media-art platform with year-round screenings and exhibitions in Berlin and various other cities. Annually parallel to the Berlin Film Festival (February), the central event of the Directors Lounge, the intensified presentation The Berlin International Directors Lounge takes place. Directors Lounge is the brainchild of filmmaker André Werner, artist Joachim Seinfeld and gallerist/curator Longest F. Stein in conjunction with the A&O-gallery and other artists from the Berlin media art scene.
The Manhattan Film Festival (MFF) is an annual film festival. It was founded in 2006 by filmmakers Philip J. Nelson and Jose Ruiz Jr.
Ja'Tovia Gary is an American artist and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work is held in the permanent collections at the Whitney Museum, Studio Museum of Harlem, and others. She is best known for her documentary film The Giverny Document (2019), which received awards including the Moving Ahead Award at the Locarno Film Festival, the Juror Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Best Experimental Film at the Blackstar Film Festival, and the Douglas Edwards Experimental Film Award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.
Annette Mangaard is a Danish/Canadian filmmaker, artist, writer, director, and producer, whose films and installations have been shown internationally at art galleries, cinematheques and film festivals. With a practice rooted in theatrical drama and explorative documentary, Mangaard's films investigate notions and nuances of freedom within the confines of structural expectations. Mangaard's early films are filled with experimental visual effects, footage is often shot in Super 8 and reshot in 16mm and then printed optically frame by frame. The result is a grainy textured look, with images that are saturated in colour.
The Havana Film Festival New York (HFFNY) is a film festival, based in New York City, that screens cinema from across Latin America with a special focus on Cuba and its film industry. It is a project of The American Friends of the Ludwig Foundation of Cuba, a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization with the mission of building cultural bridges between the United States and Cuba through arts projects.