The AFI Silver is a three-screen movie theater

Movie theater

A movie theater, cinema, movie house, picture theater, film theater is a venue, usually a building, for viewing motion pictures ....

 complex in downtown Silver Spring, Maryland

Silver Spring, Maryland

Silver Spring is an unincorporated area and census-designated place in Montgomery County, Maryland, United States. It had a population of 71,452 at the 2010 census, making it the fourth most populous place in Maryland, after Baltimore, Columbia, and Germantown.The urbanized, oldest, and...

, just north of Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....

 in the United States of America. It plays both art-house and mainstream movies. It is run by the American Film Institute

American Film Institute

The American Film Institute is an independent non-profit organization created by the National Endowment for the Arts, which was established in 1967 when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act...

.

The AFI Silver is the result of a restoration project for the original Silver Theatre in Silver Spring, which was originally designed by movie palace

Movie palace

A movie palace is a term used to refer to the large, elaborately decorated movie theaters built between the 1910s and the 1940s. The late 1920s saw the peak of the movie palace, with hundreds opened every year between 1925 and 1930.There are three building types in particular which can be subsumed...

 architect John Eberson

John Eberson

John Eberson was an American architect best known for his movie palace designs in the atmospheric theatre fashion.Born in Czernowitz, Austro-Hungarian Empire , Eberson went to highschool in Dresden and studied electrical engineering in Vienna. He arrived in the United States in 1901 and at first...

 and constructed in 1938.

In 2003 the theatre reopened. Currently it is known to be the most technically advanced Motion Picture exhibition outlet in North America. It features the ability to show 16mm, 35mm, DLP digital projection and 70mm vertical, HDCAM

HDCAM

HDCAM, introduced in 1997, is an High-definition video digital recording videocassette version of Digital Betacam, using an 8-bit DCT compressed 3:1:1 recording, in 1080i-compatible downsampled resolution of 1440×1080, and adding 24p and 23.976 PsF modes to later models...

, Betacam

Betacam

Betacam is family of half-inch professional videocassette products developed by Sony in 1982. In colloquial use, "Betacam" singly is often used to refer to a Betacam camcorder, a Betacam tape, a Betacam video recorder or the format itself....

, Betacam SP/SX, DigiBetacam, DVCAM, Mini DV, DVD, VHS, Blu-ray, D5, and DVCPRO all in state-of-the-art projectors.

Events

The AFI Silver hosts the annual Silverdocs documentary festival with co-sponsor Silver Spring-based Discovery Channel

Discovery Channel

Discovery Channel is an American satellite and cable specialty channel , founded by John Hendricks and distributed by Discovery Communications. It is a publicly traded company run by CEO David Zaslav...

. It also hosts the Washington, DC events of the annual 48 Hour Film Project

48 Hour Film Project

The 48 Hour Film Project is a contest in which teams of filmmakers are assigned a genre, a character, a prop, and a line of dialogue, and have 48 hours to create a short film containing those elements. Shortly after the 48 hours of filmmaking, the films from each city are then screened at a theater...

, which was founded by Mark Ruppert in Washington.

Other notable annual film festivals which started at its original theater at the John F. Kennedy Center include the Latin American Film Festival during September - October (which began in 1989) and the European Union Film Festival in November (1987)

External links

• AFI Silver official homepage
• SIlverdocs Silverdocs Homepage
• AFI Silver Theater and Cultural Arts Center Silver Spring's Downtown
• Silver Spring: Then & Again - The Silver Theatre