Richard Pena retires as programming director of the New York Film Festival

Jake Coyle, writing for the Associated Press:

"I'd be really pleased to be known as the person who kept the — what I think — extremely high level of the festival constant," Pena said in a recent interview in Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater. "That indeed I was given a trust in 1988 and I didn't screw up."

Most would give him far more credit than that. Pena has overseen film at Lincoln Center through a tumultuous period that's seen the graying of art house audiences, the birth of digital filmmaking and distribution, the exponential growth of film festivals and the shift of the art film's epicenter away from Europe and toward the Middle East, Asia and South America.