(Late March) The second oldest film festival in all of North America, the annual week-long Ann Arbor Film Festival has been championing independent cinema for nearly half a century. The festival is dedicated to offering an alternative to commercial movies, promoting the moving image as an art form, nurturing emerging and established directors and producers, doing educational outreach, standing up for artists’ freedom of expression, and of course providing a …more…

The DFT is housed in the Detroit Institute of Arts, one of the nation’s finest museums and one of the jewels of Detroit’s cultural life. The DFT’s handsome 1,150-seat auditorium is designed to screen each film in the aspect ratio intended by its director. Among the directors whose work has been featured in retrospectives at the theater are legends like Akira Kurosawa and Louis Malle. The DFT’s eclectic offerings include …more…

Built in 1940, the Main Art Theatre was once a single-screen movie house, but today it has three screens and shows a fine selection of independent and foreign films. The Main is located in trendy downtown Royal Oak, a Detroit suburb that also has great live performance spaces, restaurants, and cool boutiques. ...more...

(EDITOR’S NOTE: We’re working on confirmation, but to all appearances the Maple Art Theatre ceased operations at the end of January 2012.)

Located in the beautiful and upscale Bloomfield Hills area, the Maple Art Theatre has been devoted to specialized film ever since it was built in 1974. Nearly four decades later, the Maple continues to be the place to go in the Detroit area to catch the best in independent and foreign cinema. ...more...