California Film Institute
non-profit organization in the USA
The California Film Institute (CFI) is a non-profit film exhibition organization based in San Rafael, California. The organization exhibits films year-round at the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center and the Sequoia Theatre, presents the annual Mill Valley Film Festival and DOCLANDS Documentary Film Festival, and runs the CFI Education Program.
The executive director and founder of CFI is Mark Fishkin.
Mill Valley Film Festival
Founded in 1978 by Mark Fishkin, the festival is held every October and screens over 200 US and international films for over 70,000 participants.
Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center
The Rafael Film Center is a non-profit independent three-screen arthouse theater located in downtown San Rafael, California. It has been owned and operated by the California Film Institute since 1999. The venue exhibits first-run independent and studio films, documentaries, classics, retrospectives, and world cinema, and hosts special events with filmmakers from the Bay Area and from around the world. The Film Center annually serves approximately 200,000 attendees.
Sequoia Theatre
In 2018 CFI purchased the Sequoia Theatre, a historic theater built originally in 1929. At the time it was being run by the Cinemark Theatres chain, leased from the heirs of the Blumenfeld Theaters family.
“California Film Institute” enters the record as non-profit organization in the USA. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what California, Film and Institute can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“California Film Institute” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, California, Film and Institute provides the most credible route into that argument.
The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5020491. Authority coordinates are 37.973, -122.526. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1978, 1999, 2018 and 1929.
Official terminology may obscure informal participation, dissent or communities documented only indirectly. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
- Locating named record creators
Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “California Film Institute”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow California Film Institute primary sources, California Film Institute archive and California research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “California Film Institute”?
- Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
- What chronology connects this entry to wider political or social change?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “California Film Institute” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.