Camilo C. Antonio

Viennese-born New Yorker Amos Vogel is America’s grand patron of avant-garde and foreign movies, pioneering avenues that have since become mainstream platforms for independent filmmakers around the globe. On Apr. 18, he was feted in absentia at the Austrian Film Museum on his 90th birthday.

An exhibition highlighting three artists from Saudi Arabia inaugurated celebratory activities to mark the 35th Anniversary of the founding of the OPEC Fund for International Development (OFID) in Vienna.

Hosted in OFID’s headquarters on the Parkring in the 1st District, Director General Suleiman J. Al-Herbish opened the vernissage Jan. 27, calling the Anniversary an opportunity to reaffirm the organization’s mission and to revitalize efforts against poverty and supporting development.

“The Exhibition represents a visionary way of thinking by a new breed of Saudi contemporary artists,” Al-Herbish said, “[artists] whose aspirations to take their country to the right destination find positive resonance with King Abdullah.”

On a three-day visit to Toronto in 2000, I was hugely impressed by the scene as the city prepared for the 25th Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). Re-visiting Toronto ten years later, I had more time to immerse myself in the city’s dynamic features. I went there in the beginning of September to support a group of 25 outstanding Caribbean filmmakers who were selected to pitch their film projects in the world’s biggest and busiest marketplace for films, known by those in the business simply as TIFF.

With Lipsynch, Robert Lepage has gifted audiences to this year’s Vienna Festival with another one of his powerful theatre marathons – his distinctive civilizational, if playful, tool.

Lipsynch, a multilayered “dramedy” (an epic character story) is a re-enactment of what has been creatively constructed through hours of improvisational workshops since June 2005. The Quebecois artist presents the most unlikely characters that his internationally acclaimed ensemble keeps re-molding and stringing together.

Ernesto Cardenal is a staunch Roman Catholic priest from Nicaragua who has been a thorn in the flesh of the Church. His political activism as a liberation theologist was of long standing, beginning many years before he was ordained in 1965. In fact, having been forced to flee his country at the end of the 1950s, he went to the U.S and considered becoming a monk. He spent two years as a novice in the Trappist monastery in Gethsemani, Kentucky, which he left because of ill health.

“Man, being reasonable, must get drunk,” said Lord Byron. “The best of life is intoxication.” And who could disagree, wrote philosopher A.C. Grayling in his essay On Intemperance, “if he meant intoxication by art, letters, music and love?”

This was the thought that was threading through my mind as I arrived at the launching of the book, Global Art, by art writers Silvia von Bennigsen, Irene Gludowacz, and Susanne van Hagen at the Dorotheum auction house during the Vienna Art Week.

It’s a desperate time for Europe’s smokers. All the decadent societies of legend – Italy, France, Spain, as well as the UK, Germany and the Netherlands – have joined the ranks of the European Union-wide smoking ban, which applies to all restaurants, cafes and bars, and sends legions of frantic smokers out onto windblown balconies and huddled in doorways.

Most people think of fairy tales as a world of innocence and happy endings. Not if you ask the children, though, who thrive on the fears of dragons and wolves and grandmothers in disguise. There is nothing innocent about fairytales; they take the language of fantasy to talk about primal fears.