Latin film in New York City is more than just movies. New York is a film city.
We have world-class film organizations, Film at Lincoln Center produces the New York Film Festival, and other film festivals all year long.
MoMA Film is one of the world’s great film collections.
We have some of America’s leading film festivals: New York Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, DOC NYC, and more.
We have great film museums. The Museum of the Moving Image is in a movie studio.
We have wonderful independent cinemas: Film Forum, IFC Center, Maysles Documentary Center, and more.
Cinema Tropical is one of the leading Latin film promoters in the United States.
Thanks for sponsoring Latin Film:
- Film at Lincoln Center
- Havana Film Festival 🇨🇺
- Kicking + Screening Soccer Film Festival
- Marco Orsini documentary filmmaker 🇵🇷
- Screen Media
- Sephardic Film Festival 🇪🇸
Latin Film
African Diaspora International Film Festival 2024 Screens Films By and About Women, the Guardians of Culture
TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, Morningside Heights, Manhattan 🇦🇺 🇧🇩 🇹🇩 🇪🇹 🇭🇹 🇲🇦 🇼🇸 🇺🇸
New York International Children’s Film Festival (NYICFF) 2024
MANHATTAN, BROOKLYN, STATEN ISLAND, and WESTCHESTER
Continue Reading New York International Children’s Film Festival (NYICFF) 2024
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New York Film Scene
Film Organizations in NYC
These film organizations screen new movies, retrospectives, special collections, and the film festival circuit.
Film at Lincoln Center produces the New York Film Festival and festivals all year long, including the Neighboring Scenes festival of new Latin American cinema.
MoMA Film at the Museum of Modern Art holds one of the world’s leading film collections.
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 🇲🇽
Museum of the Moving Image is a film, television, and video museum on a historic film studio lot.
Film Museums in NYC
Anthology Film Archives is a research library and film presenter that preserves and screens independent film. anthologyfilmarchives.org
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has one of the world’s leading film collections.
Museum of the Moving Image is a film, television, and video museum on a historic film studio lot.
Movie Theaters in NYC
These independent cinemas go beyond the usual commercial movie theaters.
- 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
- Metrograph
- Nitehawk
- Paris Theater, Netflix’s theater, shows classic movies.
- Quad Cinema
- Roxy Cinema
- SVA Theatre
Film Festivals in New York City
- African Diaspora International Film Festival
- Americas Film Festival
- Art of the Real
- Brooklyn Film Festival
- Bushwick Film Festival
- Colombian Film Festival
- Cortocircuito Latino short film festival
- Dance on Camera is a festival of dance films co-produced by the Dance Films Association at Film at Lincoln Center.
- Doc Fortnight is the Museum of Modern Art’s documentary film festival.
- DOC NYC in November, is America’s largest documentary film festival.
- Dominican Film Festival *
- Harlem International Film Festival 2023
- Havana Film Festival *
- Human Rights Watch film festival
- International New York Film Festival
- Jewish Film Festival
- Kicking + Screening Soccer Film Festival *
- May Sumak Quechua film festival
- Neighboring Scenes Latin American film festival is coproduced by Cinema Tropical at Film at Lincoln Center.
- New Directors / New Films
- New York African Film Festival
- New York Film Festival
- New York International Children’s Film Festival *
- New York Jewish Film Festival screens the Jewish experience from around the world.
- New York Latino Film Festival
- Open Roads: New Italian Cinema
- Queens World Film Festival
- ReelAbilities New York is a disability film festival at the Marlene Meyerson JCC in the Upper West Side. reelabilities.org
- Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 🇫🇷
- Sephardic Film Festival *
- SoHo International Film Festival
- Tribeca Film Festival
- Winter Film Awards
* Sponsors
Origins of Latin Film
Film Started in New York and Paris
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.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.