Festival Diplomacy: CINE, American Nontheatrical Cinema, and the Film Festival Network

This article constructs an organizational history of the Council on International Nontheatrical Events (CINE), founded in 1957 to curate American nontheatrical cinema for international film festivals. Using the organization’s founding archives, the article emphasizes the vast yet largely unconsidered network of film festivals devoted to nontheatrical cinema in the Cold War era and underscores their political and diplomatic function as sites of cultural diplomacy. The article joins the body of scholarly work that examines the geopolitical roots of film festivals as institutions and highlights their importance to the American government and the nontheatrical film sector.