Arcadia Pictures, founded by Andrea Simon in 1988, is a non-profit production company dedicated to the creation of innovative documentaries exploring the interaction between politics, culture and religion in a variety of times and places.
Our award-winning films include commissions from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, the Jewish Museum, Center for Jewish History, Museum of Jewish Heritage, the National Gallery, the National Museum of American Jewish History, Vienna’s Künstlerhaus and other museums, and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). We have created work for PBS, the Sundance Channel, Bloomberg TV, ORF Austrian National Television, 3SAT (German satellite TV), and SBS TV Australia. Our many international co-productions include work in Israel, Italy, France, Germany, Holland, Austria, Bulgaria, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, the UK, and ex-Yugoslavia, involving negotiation of distribution and financing with partners from a wide variety of backgrounds. We have had success interpreting challenging international topics for US audiences, as well as bringing American culture to the attention of foreign viewers.
Funders include NEH; Corporation for Public Broadcasting; the Ford, Rockefeller, Getty, Annenberg, Surdna, Gottesman and Rosa Luxemburg Foundations; Columbia University, Johns Hopkins University, the US Dept. of Education, Program for Art on Film, European Integration Fund, the Jewish Communal Fund, and private sector support from Mobil, Lufthansa, Creditanstalt, and the Österreichische Nationalbank.
We believe that film is a powerful educational, political and spiritual tool. Our projects often include outreach partnerships with national and international organizations: Anti-Defamation League, Facing History and Ourselves, National Council of Churches, National Civic League, National Park Service, American Association of Museums, and other community groups, religious institutions and government offices.
About Andrea Simon Praised as both visually striking and intellectually provocative, Simon’s award-winning documentary films include:
ANGEL WAGENSTEIN: ART IS A WEAPON, a documentary portrait of the brilliant and charismatic Bulgarian filmmaker, novelist, and lifelong revolutionary. Described by distinguished film historian Thomas Elsaesser as “A gem of a film,” it was nominated for the American Historical Association’s 2018 Documentary Film Prize, and has screened at dozens of festivals. The Jewish Week wrote about it: “The vagaries of film distribution, beset by commercial exigencies and political tensions, have left Angel Wagenstein all but unknown outside Eastern Europe. Seeing Simon’s graceful, handsome and intelligent film, and being delighted by Wagenstein’s earthy, candid wit, one hopes that the situation can be ameliorated.” Cineaste wrote: “The scriptwriter, author, socialist, and political activist Angel Wagenstein is not a household name in the English-speaking world, though Andrea Simon's bracing documentary about him suggests that he should be. ... Simon wisely keeps the always fascinating Wagenstein at the center of her film, skillfully weaving the complex tapestry of this dynamic life and work into a vivid, but candid, portrait. Is it time for a Wagenstein retrospective?”
Her NEH-commissioned film-essay on American identity, TALK TO ME, first broadcast on public television as part of a national media education project called ''A More Perfect Union: Americans in Conversation,” was praised as "More eloquent than a decade's worth of presidential speechifying...This America sings" (Todd Gitlin, WSJ).
Selected earlier work includes THE HAPPINESS OF STILL LIFE: SCENES FROM THE AUSTRIAN BIEDERMEIER; PBS specials DESTINATION MOZART: A NIGHT AT THE OPERA WITH PETER SELLARS and VIENNA 1900 (a MoMA commission); for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, FAYUM PORTRAITS, and ART OF INDONESIA: TALES FROM THE SHADOW WORLD (collaboration with National Gallery of Art); KORIAM’S LAW, intimate portrait of a “cargo cult” in Papua New Guinea. ZAKHOR, an exploration of history and memory with Simon Schama, was commissioned by New York’s Center for Jewish History. IMPRISONED LIGHTNING, commissioned for the 125th anniversary of Statue of Liberty, explores the changing significance of this national symbol in a post-9/11 world. As Producer on Bloomberg TV's acclaimed arts program MUSE, Simon created 118 short films: subjects ranged from Günter Grass to Philip Glass to Philip Roth. Other favorites: Roz Chast, Pierre Boulez, Sean Scully, Brice Marden, Judy Chicago, David Adjaye, Kiki Smith, Kehinde Wiley, and Robert A.M. Stern.
SALKA VIERTEL, EVERY SUNDAY was produced for The Jewish Museum’s landmark 2005 exhibition “Jewish Women and Their Salons: The Power of Conversation,” together with LA JUIVE, a portrait of Geneviève Bizet Straus. SALKA is now part of the traveling exhibition “Bertolt Brecht's Paper War: Exile in America,” curated by Grischa Meyer.
Simon is particularly interested in projects on Jewish culture and history, and curated "SHA’AR: Song of the Gate," an art exhibition combining contemporary work with medieval Hebrew manuscripts, for Toronto’s Baycrest Foundation in 2022. The show considers the Gate, שער, as a mystical symbol of transformation in post-exilic Jewish thought and a signifier of Jewish-Muslim collaboration in Al-Andalus.