Boston Area Film Festivals

Film Festivals provide a great opportunity for movie fans to check out small, new, or hard-to-find films. There are many film festivals in the Boston area providing this exact opportunity throughout the year. Here are some Boston area film festivals film buffs may want to mark on their calendars.

The Boston Film Festival is the premiere film festival in the region. The festival runs every year in early autumn. Films there include work by local filmmakers as well as “art house” fare and showings of bigger name films. Directors and stars are sometimes on hand for evening events before headliner movies are shown. A-list talent like Annette Bening and Kevin Spacey have put in appearances over the last few years. Several classic venues participate in the festival, including the Copely.

The Boston International Film Festival takes place in early June. Begun in 2002, the festival’s goal is to “to encourage and support the work of worldwide independent filmmakers and to promote their products as an art concept and as a valuable contribution to world understanding.” The festival includes short and feature length films from artists from all over the globe – Asia, Europe, Africa, North America. It also sponsors a screenwriting contest. The Boston International Film Festival showcases films at various Boston venues including AMC/Lowes.

Boston has become a very ethnically diverse town in the last few decades. But even before immigrants from Asia, South America and Africa joined Boston’s citizenry, there were sizable Jewish and, of course, Irish populations in Boston. It makes sense, then, that films from these two ethnic groups would be the subject of their own respective Boston-are film festivals.