The Film Forum is a nonprofit movie theater at 209 West Houston Street in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, New York City. It is a four-screen movie theater open 365 days a year, with up to 250,000 annual admissions, nearly 500 seats, 60 employees, over 6,500 members, and an operating budget of $7 million. It is the only autonomous nonprofit cinema in New York City and one of the few in the United States.
Founded in 1970, Film Forum was led for 51 years by Karen Cooper, under whom it grew from a weekend screening room into a four-screen cinema known for premiering independent and foreign films, many without American distribution. Bruce Goldstein established its repertory program in 1986. Tabitha Jackson, formerly director of the Sundance Film Festival, became director in February 2026.
Contents
History
Founding and Upper West Side
Film Forum was founded in 1970 by Peter Feinstein and Sandy Miller, two cinephiles who wanted a venue for films made outside Hollywood. It began as an alternative screening space for independent films, with 50 folding chairs, one projector and a $19,000 annual budget, in a loft on West 88th Street. Screenings were held on Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings and coffee was served. Cooper, who first visited as a reporter, later described the audience as a mix of students, intellectuals, radicals and working people.
Karen Cooper, a Smith College literature graduate who wrote a monthly column on independent film in New York for the magazine Filmmakers Newsletter, first visited the theater as a reporter. Feinstein, unable to support himself on the roughly $100 a week the operation paid, offered it to her, and Cooper became director in 1972. The organization's assets at the time totaled $49.02. The single projector was a 16 mm machine, which Cooper at times operated herself.
Cooper solicited submissions from directors through a notice in Filmmakers Newsletter, offering to pay return shipping. Seeking foreign titles, she also traveled to the Cannes Film Festival and acquired films there.
Cooper's programming drew notice from critics who wrote favorably about the theater even though they were sometimes critical of individual bookings. Roger Greenspun of The New York Times dismissed a pair of films she had billed as funky westerns. J. Hoberman, who began writing regularly for The Village Voice in the late 1970s, covered documentaries, foreign films, animation and experimental work that the paper's senior critics passed over.
Vandam and Watts streets
By 1975 Film Forum had outgrown the 88th Street space, and a three-year grant from the Ford Foundation allowed Cooper to move it downtown to Vandam Street, into a building now occupied by the SoHo Playhouse. The theater shared the room with a resident stage company, striking the screen after each show so the set could be reassembled.
In 1980, with a $400,000 low-interest loan from the Ford Foundation, Cooper built a twin cinema in a former garage at 57 Watts Street, designed by the architect Stephen Tilly. The site was owned by Trinity Church, and Film Forum signed a 21-year lease containing a clause under which Trinity would pay the theater about $275,000 if the building were demolished. The developer Edward J. Minskoff Equities subsequently bought the property from Trinity and agreed to pay Film Forum an undisclosed sum to move. Cooper has said she contested the arrangement before the buyout was reached.
The Watts Street theater closed on September 4, 1989 and was demolished the following month; an office tower was built on the site.
Having two screens to fill, Cooper hired Bruce Goldstein in 1986 to program repertory. Goldstein then ran a film publicity firm and had previously programmed the Bleecker Street Cinema, the Carnegie Hall Cinema and the Thalia on the Upper West Side.
West Houston Street
Film Forum signed a 20-year lease at 209 West Houston Street, between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, and opened there in 1990 after several months without a venue. The new cinema occupied 10,000 square feet, twice the size of the Watts Street theater, and held three screens seating 137, 148 and 173; the Watts Street marquee was preserved and reinstalled. The building, a former printing plant, was built at a cost of $3.2 million. According to Goldstein, Cooper required a site near the 1 subway line, on the reasoning that the theater's core audience had followed it from the Upper West Side. Cooper designed the building, instructing the architect that it should resemble "a cross between the Bauhaus and Pee-wee's Playhouse", and selected the artwork hung in the lobby.
In 1994, Film Forum was honored with a Village Award by the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, even though it is technically in SoHo.
Mike Maggiore joined as artistic director in 1996 and began selecting premieres alongside Cooper. In 2007 a board member purchased a brownstone on King Street, around the corner from the cinema, to house Film Forum's offices.
2018 renovation
Film Forum announced in September 2017 that it would add a fourth screen, built in space adjoining the existing theater, and renovate the other three auditoriums. The screening rooms had not been altered since the building opened in 1990, though the restrooms were upgraded in 2014 and the concession stand rebuilt in 2015. Patrons surveyed in 2016 had supplied feedback and complaints about the existing setup, seating among them.
The work installed wider and softer seats with additional legroom and steepened the floor slope, adding stadium seating in the rear rows to improve sightlines. It was overseen by Stephen Tilly, the architect of Film Forum's earlier Watts Street cinema. The project was budgeted at about $5 million, more than half of which had been raised by the time of the announcement; the Thompson Family Foundation made a gift for naming rights to the fourth screen, and a capital campaign sought the balance along with money for the endowment. The work formed part of an initiative called Film Forum 50, timed ahead of the theater's 50th anniversary in 2020, which combined the construction with an effort to enlarge the endowment and was budgeted at $6 million in total. The theater closed for construction in May 2018 and reopened that summer.
COVID-19 pandemic
Film Forum closed for nearly 13 months during the COVID-19 pandemic. It reopened on April 2, 2021 at the 25 percent capacity then permitted by the city, which limited its largest auditorium to 38 people and its smallest to 20. Masks were required, concessions were suspended, and ticket lines and seating were spaced. It introduced reserved seating as a pandemic measure and returned to first-come, first-served admission in March 2022. In September 2021, water from the remnants of Hurricane Ida entered the building during a screening and the audience was evacuated; damage was slight and screenings resumed the following day.
Leadership
Film Forum has been led by four directors. The co-founder Peter Feinstein ran it from its opening in 1970 until 1972, when he offered the operation to Karen Cooper. Cooper held the position for 51 years, a tenure spanning the theater's growth from a loft screening room to a four-screen cinema. Two directors have followed her within three years.
Karen Cooper
Cooper directed Film Forum from 1972 to 2023; her work in that period is described in the History and Programming sections. The board unanimously approved a change in leadership in November 2022, and the succession was announced that January. She stepped down at the end of June 2023, remaining as an advisor with a focus on programming and fundraising and retaining a seat on the film selection committee.
Sonya Chung
Sonya Chung became director effective July 1, 2023. A novelist who had taught English at Skidmore College, she worked in Film Forum's development department from 2003 to 2007, returned to the organization in 2018, and had served as deputy director since 2020. She left the position in December 2025, after two years in the role; no reason for her departure was made public.
Tabitha Jackson
Tabitha Jackson was named director on February 2, 2026, and took up the post on February 23, the third person to hold it in under three years. Her appointment followed a national search led by board chair Gray Coleman and the human resources professional Stella Strazdas.
Jackson began her career at the BBC as a researcher, producer and director, and later worked at Channel 4 as a commissioning editor for arts, performance and animation and as an executive producer for Film4. She joined the Sundance Institute in 2013 and oversaw its Documentary Film Program before serving as director of the Sundance Film Festival from 2020 to 2022, overseeing its first largely online editions during the COVID-19 pandemic.. She subsequently held research fellowships at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Open Documentary Lab, the Royal Shakespeare Company and Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, along with a Rockefeller Foundation residency.
The directorship was restructured for her arrival. Where Cooper and Chung had made day-to-day programming decisions, Jackson's role carries oversight of programming rather than direct responsibility for it, a change she described as intended to leave time for considering the theater's longer-term position.
Programming
Film Forum presents two distinct film programs: premieres of American independents and foreign art films, programmed by Karen Cooper, Mike Maggiore, and Sonya Chung, and repertory programming, which includes foreign and American classics, genre works, festivals, and directors' retrospectives, programmed by Bruce Goldstein.
Reputation
Filmmakers such as Agnès Varda, D. A. Pennebaker, Christopher Nolan, Kelly Reichardt, Ramin Bahrani and many others have praised the theater and its programming. Actor Ethan Hawke said in a 2018 testimonial that "part of what I love about Film Forum is that you can trust them. They will leave you better than you came". Director and actor André Gregory said in 2022, "If New York lost the Statue of Liberty, it would not be a real loss, but if Film Forum disappeared, it would be absolutely heartbreaking."