New York Latin Culture Magazine®

World-class Indigenous, European & African Culture since 2012

Film in New York City

Film in New York City is more than just movies. We have the busiest movie theater in America, world-class film organizations, film festivals, film museums, and independent cinemas. New York City is itself a movie star.

Harlem Stage Develops Visionary Artists of Color

When We Dance, The Son Also Rises: Black Men in Dance 🇺🇸
Nova Frontier Film Festival, African Diaspora, Middle Eastern, and Latin American film 🇺🇸 🇧🇪 🇬🇧 🇮🇷 🇫🇷 🇲🇽 🇸🇳 🇪🇸 🇹🇷

MANHATTANVILLE, West Harlem, Manhattan

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Sponsors

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NYC Film Organizations

Latin Film in New York City (Serhii Bobyk/Dreamstime)
Latin Film in New York City (Serhii Bobyk/Dreamstime)

These film organizations screen new movies, retrospectives, special collections, and the film festival circuit.

Anthology Film Archives is a research library and film presenter that preserves and screens independent film. anthologyfilmarchives.org

Cinema Tropical is one of America’s leading Latin film presenters. cinematropical.com 🇲🇽

Film at Lincoln Center produces the New York Film Festival and film festivals all year long.

MoMA Film at the Museum of Modern Art is one of the world’s great film collections.

Museum of the Moving Image is a film, television, and video museum on a historic film studio lot.

NYC Film Festivals

We have some of America’s leading film festivals: New York Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, DOC NYC, and more.

* Sponsors

NYC Movie Theaters

We have wonderful independent cinemas: Film Forum, IFC Center, Maysles Documentary Center, and more.

  • AMC Empire 25 in Times Square is the busiest cinema in the United States.
  • Alamo Drafthouse
  • Cinépolis Chelsea
  • Director’s Guild of America (DGA Theater)
  • Film Forum is a non-profit independent cinema that screens classic and international films in Hudson Square, Manhattan.
  • IFC Center
  • Maysles Documentary Center is non-profit cinema with a vibrant film community in Harlem.
  • Metrograph
  • Nitehawk
  • Paris Theater, Netflix’s theater, shows classic movies.
  • Quad Cinema
  • Roxy Cinema
  • SVA Theatre

Film Seasons

Film festivals help determine which movies get released in the coming year. The festival calendar is oriented around the Oscars (Academy Awards), the world’s most prestigious film awards.

The film year starts with Berlin in February. Cannes arrives in May. Tribeca is in June. Things get interesting in September with Venice, Toronto and New York.

To stay top-of-mind during film awards season, studios screen their best films during the year-end holidays. Oscar entries for “Best International Feature Film” are due at the end of October. You can see many international entries during the holidays. Oscar nominations are usually announced in January. Voting is in February, for the Academy Awards in March.

Origins of Latin Film

New York has been a film city since the beginning of movie making. But great ideas often appear independently in two places, around the same time. It’s some kind of synchronicity.

  1. The Black Maria at Thomas Edison’s labs in West Orange, New Jersey was the world’s first movie studio. It opened and made the first motion picture in 1893. Edison’s Kinetoscope began showing movies on machines in an amusement arcade at 1155 Broadway (at 27th St), just north of Madison Square, in 1894.
  2. The first commercial movie screening was produced by the Lumiere brothers in Paris in 1895.

The first movies were a lot like vaudeville. After all, it was the Vaudeville Era (1880s-1920s). In 1895, Edison began making “actualities” of every day street scenes. New York City was the perfect backdrop. It still is. Today we would call them Tik Toks.

Fort Lee, New Jersey, just across the George Washington Bridge, was the center of America’s film industry from 1909 to 1918. Then production moved to Hollywood.

The post-war Paris Theater in Midtown is Manhattan’s last single screen cinema. It was going to shut down, but was purchased by Netflix.

A lot of film and television is still made in New York. The City itself is a star in many great movies.

Published ~ Updated .

Filed Under: Latin

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