Latin Film in New York City is more than just movies. New York is a film city. In addition to the busiest movie theater in America, we have world-class film organizations, film festivals, film museums, and independent cinemas. New York City is also a movie star.
African Diaspora International Film Festival NYC Brings the Many Faces of Mother Afrika To New York City
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, Morningside Heights, Manhattan
CINEMA VILLAGE, Greenwich Village
LEONARD NIMOY THALIA, Upper West Side
🇺🇸 🇧🇧 🇧🇪 🇧🇷 🇨🇲 🇨🇦 🇪🇨 🇪🇬 🇫🇷 🇩🇪 🇬🇭 🇬🇼 🇭🇹 🇰🇪 🇲🇬 🇲🇦 🇲🇿 🇳🇱 🇳🇬 🇵🇹 🇿🇦 🇸🇷 🇺🇾 🇿🇼
México Now Festival Brings Contemporary Mexican Art and Culture to New York City
CHELSEA FACTORY, Chelsea, Manhattan 🇲🇽
International Puerto Rican Heritage Film Festival is a Deep Dive into Boricua Identity and Filmmaking
“EL BARRIO,” EAST HARLEM, Manhattan
El Museo del Barrio
Silberman School of Social Work
LOWER EAST SIDE, Manhattan
Regal Essex Crossing
DOC NYC Documentary Film Festival Screens Films That Make You Think About What’s Going On All Around Us Right Now
IFC CENTER, SVA THEATRE, VILLAGE EAST BY ANGELIKA, West Village, Chelsea, East Village, Manhattan 🇺🇸 🇦🇷 🇧🇷 🇨🇴 🇨🇺 🇩🇴 🇭🇹 🇮🇳 🇮🇱 🇳🇬 🇵🇸 🇸🇩
Sponsors
Thanks for sponsoring Latin Film in New York City:
- Film at Lincoln Center
- Havana Film Festival 🇨🇺
- Kicking + Screening Soccer Film Festival
- Marco Orsini documentary filmmaker 🇵🇷
- Screen Media
- Sephardic Film Festival 🇪🇸
NYC Film News
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 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.
- African Diaspora International Film Festival shows how the African Diaspora is many branches with the same roots. It is the one film festival where we want to see every movie.
- Americas Film Festival
- Brooklyn Film Festival
- Bushwick Film Festival
- Colombian International 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 is America’s largest documentary film festival, and one of the best in the world.
- Dominican Film Festival New York *
- Harlem International Film Festival brings film to Harlem and Harlem to the film community.
- Havana Film Festival New York *
- Human Rights Watch film festival ended in 2024.
- International New York Film Festival
- Jewish Film Festival
- Kicking + Screening Soccer Film Festival *
- May Sumak Quechua film festival
- New Directors / New Films
- New York African Film Festival screens films from Mother Afrika and the Diaspora at Film at Lincoln Center, Maysles Documentary Center, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM).
- New York Film Festival at Film at Lincoln Center is one of the longest-running and most respected film festivals in the United States.
- New York International Children’s Film Festival (NYICFF) *
- New York Jewish Film Festival screens the Jewish experience from around the world.
- New York Latino Film Festival screens films from across the Latin world, and brings together the industry and up-and-coming Latin filmmakers.
- Open Roads: New Italian Cinema is an Italian movie showcase coproduced with Cinecittà at Film at Lincoln Center. It is usually in May or June. 🇮🇹
- Queens World Film Festival is a film festival of emerging filmmakers that brings the world to Queens, and Queens to the world. 🗽
- ReelAbilities Film Festival 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 is an intersection of film, celebrity, and popular culture.
- Winter Film Awards
* 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.
- 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.