The first US-based international film festival was launched in San Francisco, CA in 1956, twenty-four years after Mussolini endorsed the first of its kind in Venice. Today more than 100 film festivals run from January to December every year, from Park City, Utah, to Houston, to New York City, to Sarasota. Some festivals, like Sundance and WorldFest Houston, attract a great deal of attention. Others specialize in formats such as animation and documentary or films about Native Americans, gays and lesbians, Asian Americans, Latinos, African Americans, Underground issues, children, ethnography women’s issues and many other issues.

America lagged behind Europe in launching film festivals in the 1950s because of Hollywood. The all-powerful studios did not want to supply many films to European festivals, diminishing American exposure. Furthermore, film festivals have been showplaces for art films. Early Hollywood had no interest in mixing commerce with art, while many Europeans did not find Hollywood films worthy of their attention. Not until the breakdown of the studio system and the development of independent films would world film festivals start to value American products. At the same time, more and more festivals sprang up in the US to showcase the variety of American productions (including studios).

The second major US festival was launched in New York in 1963, when foreign filmgoing was in vogue as a highbrow cultural activity; it landed the unknown Roman Polanski on the cover of Time. By the early twenty-first century, the festival in New York, with its limited number (twenty-five) of films shown, is no longer as important; many of its films already have distributors lined up. Film festivals, in the latter part of the twentieth century have been important outlets for independent films, making these films as well as their film-makers known to the critic and the public, and thus creating a marketplace.

In many ways, successful independent films and the film festivals that promote them benefit each other. Sex, Lies, and Videotape, with a $1 million budget, won the Audience Prize at Sundance in 1989. It was then picked up by Miramax and grossed $7 million.

Since then, Sundance (founded in 1981 by Robert Redford) has become the premier film festival in the US for both “Hollywood types” and aspiring independent producers/directors who brave the cold in Park City, Utah. Sundance has promoted Native American film and has also established an Independent Film Archive at the University of Southern California. An alternative to Sundance, Slamdance, established in 1995, shows films rejected by Sundance.

Some cities use film festivals to attract visitors and to promote the image of the city like the Nortel Palm Spring International Film Festival (started by the late Sonny Bono, a former entertainer and mayor of Palm Springs) or the French Film Festival in Sarasota, Florida. Other film festivals focus on distribution, like the American Film Market in Santa Monica, California, which screens over 600 films in nine days. This is a prime distribution event for English-language films, including such hits as Silence of the Lambs.

Yet film festivals can be small and less mainstream. Nextframe, for example, is a student film and video festival organized by Temple University in Philadelphia. The San Francisco International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival has just finished its twenty-threeyear run, obviously focusing on queer cinema. Resfest Digital Film Festival is devoted to the exploration of digital form in film. The Chicago Underground Film Festival only accepts films with a budget below $1,000 per minute.