Viva's most provocative event this month was surely Friday's closing night debate of Mookie Tenenbaum's show at White Box. Everything leaped suddenly into cultural perspective. Who attends all these waves of new films at festivals such as New Directors/New Films? What is the purpose of art with almost a dozen different art shows as part of The Armory Show week? How effective are arts education/improved access and participation? Should art/films ever be allowed to plummet the nadir of entertainment? Hackneyed questions and debates for sure.

And Mookie enrages people because he seemingly won't support anything beyond an existentialist belief that there is really nothing more to life beyond, as he puts it, our enjoyment of licking an ice-cream cone. What is interesting about Tenenbaum is that he readily admits that his opinions are one thing and his art another. And when you think about it, that is quite rare for an artist - so scared are they of REALLY offending anyone or anything. In a nut shell, one could say that his art mocks liberal hypocrisy but it is no more or less offensive than watching Monty Python's Life of Brian or The Meaning of Life and the Holy Grail. I dare you not to LOL at Mookie's Ave Maria video.

Mr.Mookie arrived at the end of a fortnight in which, forsooth, Viva had seen 17 of the 28 New Directors/New Films 2012. Though all linear in narrative it did beg the question whether such linearity is dead after all in the age of the video/camerphone remix (Toni Dove's Spectropia prems in April). And see what video artist Beryl Korot was/is up to in her retrospective at bitforms gallery.

Probably my fave film of ND/NF 2012 Found Memories (Historias Que So Existem Quando Lembradas) ran in a dead heat with The Ambassador (and equally with Norwegian Joachim Trier's (no relation to the Danish Lars) Oslo, August 31. There are some great films in this fest (as always). Some you'll see again on limited release and some just not. Had an interesting chat with the distributor (Monterey Media) of maverick director (well ain't they all;) Guy Madden's new film Keyhole (IFC releases April 11). And interestingly big boys Entertainment One bought the initial sales rights: such is the convoluted pecking order (if that's even a near appropriate description) of indy film distribution.

When a colleague was slagging off Hollywood, I immediately thought of the few remaining indy arms of Hollywood parents - Sony Classics distributing Indonesian hit The Raid (ND/NF and just released in NYC) and Asghar Farhadi's A Separation, or Fox Searchlight releasing artist Steve McQueen's Shame. Or what about Sony Classics' release of the all too staggering political for being unpolitical Footnote (Joseph Cedar)?

Back to Brazilian Julia Murat's 1st feature Found Memories (Film Movement will NYC release). What draws one to this film is just how in touch with reality it is in questioning how to represent the present/past photographically (the key is in the Portuguese title of remembrance). Youngster Rita stumbles upon the 'forgotten' village Jotuomba. And like me she's seemingly arrogant only in so much as she has a quest. What that is (or might be) is what will intrigue you about this film. Her entourage is a digital camera and a tin box 'pin-hole' camera: for how else could/would one even imagine conjuring images of kind strangers without recourse to the passing of light and time. Her actors are seasoned professionals rather than non. Murat's cinematographer was that of Lisandro Alonso: Lucio Bonelli Liverpool. Seek and you will find.

Or rather: how do we tell our imagined stories or indeed those we suppress but long to promulgate. A great pairing of Boris Mikhailov and August Sander photo portraits at Pace/McGill. At Thursday's opening Sander's great grandson Julian explained that contrary to the popular belief that Sander was somehow documenting pre and emerging Weimar social classes he was in fact very like young Rita in Found Memories. Allowing the personalities of his subjects to shine through in the darkroom.

We have a Terence Davies retrospective at the BAMcinématek and his latest film, an adaptation of Terence Rattigan's play The Deep Blue Sea, is one of the most moving, cathartic movies you are ever likely to see. Davis, like Murat, is concerned with time and place: the immortal and temporal. We live, we die. But the filmmakers world is that comma in-between. And therein lies the difference between the screen and the literary form. You'd have thought that using huge chunks of Samuel Barber's Violin Concerto would totally swamp an image. But Davis dances with it. Sculpts. Ushers us into another reality that is both ours and nor forever more. There's both a languor and an emergency.

Life is ultimately about the choices we make. Some of us have more limited horizons than others. Nonetheless - all of us have horizons beyond the dictates of our immediate friend or foe. ND/NF director Mads Matthiesen's Teddy Bear (it's a good transliteration from the Danish 10 Times Til Paradise). has a plot reeking of cliche but as such it finds the origins of cliche in something very, very normal and sincere. Bodybuilder Dennis, lives with his mum (whose akin to most other world mums): loving but ultimately possessive. We learn little about Dennis except that he is laconic and sincere. Bored with the mundane Danish dating scene he takes the advice of a relative and travels to Thailand hoping he might meet a significant female other. There's nothing wrong with liking this film. Life can make you happy licking that ice cream in a time and place of your choosing.

Strangely in the same vein is fellow Dane/Mads Brügger's The Ambassador. Brave chap Mr Mads B. He gave us The Red Chapel last year infiltrating North Korea. This time he films secretly his adventures as a diplomat passport for sale holder in Liberia and the Central African Republic - where at any time if they don't like the look of your ice-cream 'they' can pay a deadly night-time visit. This is Michael Moore. But far funnier and far less (if at all) moralistic. This is how life is. Perhaps it could be better, perhaps a lot worse. But like Mookie Tenenbaum's animation on how the Red Cross ignored the Holocaust of the Jews, Brügger leads one to consider the millions of aid money and resources spent, if not ignoring, then foolishly ameliorating African so-called democracies and power players both African and Western.

Why waste your money on a shrink when you can see all these thought-provoking films? Because ultimately, that's really the value of all these artistic endeavours, isn't it? Oslo, August 31 will definitely not make you happy. But it will allow you to consider what does or could make you happy or moreover discontent. The fact that the film's protagonist decides to opt out of existence doesn't mean you should. But his is a conscious decision rather than one imposed upon him by society. And that's what's most fascinating about the best of the ND/NF films. They are all to do with empowerment. And even if you don't agree with the characters' life choices they most definitely have decided they ain't gonna be rats upon a wheel of life.

Marina's actions in Twilight Portrait may disgust you. But she journeys from being the victim both domestically and in the outside world to creating her own fate. Even the policeman who is lured (or does he fall as if taking the apple) into her web makes somewhat a journey of self-knowledge. Again, you may not think that he deserves redemption (either way) but at least these are people in movement not stasis. In contrast, Generation P is a brilliant exercise in making one feel absolutely powerless in a world run by oligarchy. Society seems to compell 19 year-old Roman Kogler Breathing to a fate in a juvenile detention center and a job in a morgue. But he's ultimately the one who learns the use of his lungs while others slowly suffocate.

A more appealing movie, perhaps, is Now Forager (an interesting US/Polish co-production) - 'a film about love and fungi'. Again, what gives you the most pleasure in life (i.e mushrooms) can, if you're not on your toes and have your wits about you, give excruciating pain or death. An obvious life metaphor, maybe, but one that co-director/writer Jason Cortlund and Julia Halperin execute with a deft, drole humour. Nature never compromises and adaptation is certainly never compromise. Donoma's (literally Sioux for 'the day is here') French/Haitian director did, however, seem to compromise his very startling $200 politically incorrect debut film by adding/developing an extra hour to what would have been footage far far punchier if shorter.

Filmmakers could all take lessons from Iranian Asghar Farhadi in crafting films that are political without the correct capital P. His recent world success A Separation didn't spring from nowhere as Lincoln Center's retrospective next week proves. And while he underscores some emotive scenes the final moments of Beautiful City - using simply the sound of life - Farhadi seems to muse that though we want a solution so often one just will never exist and we all have is that daily round of Camus' La Peste. The a cappella ballad spun by real life protagonist Porfirio really sends shivers down your spine. And How to Survive a Plague reveals how difficult is the fight and struggle for cures - here with all the prevailing in-fighting of the AIDS ACT UP movement. A double-edged sword to be sure that some did survive.

Another documentary 5 Broken Cameras chronicles the fight of Palestinian village Bil'in. And it becomes almost bludgeoningly surreal how one day Israeli soldiers are prepared to kill to preserve the separation wall's sanctity while the next a court rules that it no longer has any foundation in law and is removed. Stanley Kubrick's first feature Fear and Desire (1953) and newly restored shows he was characteristically delving into the heart of darkness from Day 1 of his career. ND/NF even includes an entry level film for kids to discuss the nature of existence in The Rabbi's Cat an animation in 3D of Joann Sfar's graphic novel.

And ironically, the festival's opening night film Where Do We Go Now? was the most fun and yet one of the weakest offerings with its feelgood vibe. You sensed,though, an irony hinted at in the title by director Nadine Labaki. There is nowhere to go. Except into one's imagination. Raul Ruiz's Three Crowns of the Sailor (1983) isn't a great film by any means in terms of meat on the dialectical bone but if there was an Über ice cream of a film this would be a contender. It screened (and rarely is as with most of his early work) as part of Lincoln Center's homage to its 50years of the annual autumn New York Film Festival. Deliciously lensed by Sacha Vierny, the sailor's tales become a Rorschach test for its audience.

So too does Guy Madden's Keyhole which he admitted at last week's Q&A is his most serious movie to date and is somewhat of a personal psychoanalysis. As a total opposite try Avigdor Arikha (a much respected artist by playwright Samuel Beckett) at the Marlborough Gallery where he draws out life's mundanities with extraordinary simplicity and back to normality again. Diane Tuft's photography nestles next door and derives form her scientific background: looking within the ordinariness of nature to discover what lies beneath. .

Bharti Kher's sculpture at Hauser and Wirth has much more impact in the flesh rather than in reproduction and "plumbs metaphysical questions raised by our relationship to life’s quotidian activities and objects". Moreover, it's quite fun! And did you really miss anything in the Armory Show week? Well, I didn't make it to the Armory Show itself and I walked off in a huff when the Art Show made me check my very modest (but valuable) bag only to find dozens of other gals/boys/and other creatures with bags almost twice the size of mine! They don't like young ladies with starry eyes or something? What: I look like a vaginally challenged Van Gogh ready to slit something off;)? Then there were the hotel rooms full of art such as Pool at the Flat Iron Toshi Hotel where you admired how each artist approached the challenge of mounting a show in 200 sq foot of space. Or the Fountain Art Fair at the midtown east Armory with loads of edgier work. And what promises to be a great new space downtown Hotel Particulier. And of course Moving Image devoted to video art. Fairs can be fun and boistrous for all sorts of reasons and they feed into the monetizing wheels of art. But like film art is for the most part a solitary contemplative experience. And the great thing about NYC is that those doors are always open and the choice is yours.

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