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Latin Film NYC

Latin film in NYC is more than movies. We have unique independent theaters such as Film Forum, IFC Center, and Maysles Documentary Center.

We have film organizations such as Film at Lincoln Center which basically produces film festivals all year long, MoMA Film, Cinema Tropical, and others.

The New York Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, DOC NYC, and Cinema Tropical Film Festival are among America’s leading film festivals.

We have great film museums. The Museum of Modern Art holds one of the world’s leading film collections. The Museum of the Moving Image is on an old studio lot.

Latin Culture in Film

latin film nyc archive

NYC Film Organizations

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 film festivals all year long, including the New York Film Festival.

MoMA Film at the Museum of Modern Art holds one of the world’s leading film collections.

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

NYC Movie Theaters

These cinemas go beyond the usual commercial movie theaters.

Alamo Drafthouse

Cinépolis Chelsea

Director’s Guild of America (DGA Theater)

Film Forum

IFC Center

Maysles Documentary Center

Metrograph

Nitehawk

The Paris Theater is Netflix’s main movie theater.

Quad Cinema

Roxy Cinema

SVA Theatre

NYC Film Festivals

NYC Film Museums

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

The Museum of Modern Art has one of the world’s leading film collections.

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

The Film Calendar

Film Festivals help determine which new films get released in the coming year.

The film festival calendar is oriented around the Oscars or Academy Awards, the world’s most prestigious film awards which are usually held 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. Oscar entries for Best International Feature Film are due at the end of October.

Studios try to screen their best films during the year-end holiday season, to be top-of-mind during film awards season.

The Origins of Film in New York City

Great human ideas often appear independently in two places at once, around the same time.

The first commercial movie screening was produced by the Lumiere brothers in 1895 Paris, but Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope began showing movies on machines in an amusement arcade at 1155 Broadway (at 27th St) in 1894.

The Black Maria at 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.

The first motion pictures were a lot like vaudeville. After all, it was the Vaudeville Era (1880s – 1920s). But after 1895, Edison began making “actualities” of street scenes of everyday life. Today we would call them short documentaries. New York City was the perfect scene.

Fort Lee, New Jersey was the center of America’s film industry from 1909 to 1918, before production moved to Hollywood.

The post-war Paris Theater in Midtown is Manhattan’s last single screen cinema. It was shut down, but was then 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.