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Art is one of the ways people communicate with one another. Every work of art brings the viewer to into a special kind of relationship, both with whoever has created or is creating the art and also with everyone else who—together with him, or before or afterwards—is subject to that
artistic impression.
—Leo Tolstoy

It would be a mistake to ascribe this creative power
to an inborn talent.
In art, the genius creator is not just a gifted being, but a person who has succeeded in arranging for their appointed end, a complex of activities, of which the work is the outcome, requiring an effort.
—Henri Matisse

Art is so varied that to reduce it to any single purpose, be it even the salvation of mankind, is an abomination before the Lord.
—Nikolai Gumilev

Conception, my boy, fundamental brain work,
is what makes all the difference in art.
—Dante Gabriel Rosetti

Art is art.
Everything else is everything else.
—Ad Reinhardt

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance…
and I know of no substitute whatever
for the force and beauty of its process.
—Henry James

It's not what you look at that matters,
it's what you see.
—Henry David Thoreau

RDFF 2014

Russian Documentary Film Festival

In October 2014, Seventh Annual Russian Documentary Film Festival once again brought New York a diverse array of the best of contemporary Russian documentary filmmaking. The films focused on key moments and themes in Russia's present and past, contemporary society, its artists and writers, heroes, victims, sinners and saints, and most of all—what documentary cinema in Russia is all about today.

More than twenty new films had their premieres at the famed Tribeca Cinemas. Many of the directors were made personal appearances at RDFF 2014, introducing their films to the audience and answering questions afterwards.

The program included a number of special programs, including In the Beginning was the Word, devoted to Russian literature, with films on Vasily Grossman, Viktor Pelevin, and a group of leading contemporary Russian writers.

All films were presented with English subtitles.

The Seventh Russian Documentary Film Festival was organized by The New Review, Inc., the oldest intellectual literary journal of the Russian-speaking diaspora, based in New York since 1942, in partnership with Causa Artium, the Diana Bagrationi Foundation, and the Russian National Guild of Documentary Films and Television (Media Associate, Russia).