La Filmoteca Short Film Fest

Our festival runs one night a month, from April to December, with new screenings each month. Each selected project will receive our Official Certificate (digital) ready for printing, and will be featured on our website and social media for promotion. Be a part of our monthly screenings to large audiences in San José, Costa Rica.

With 15 years of experience providing the best of the World’s Cinema within Costa Rica to several communities, La Filmoteca Cine Arte is a very recognized institution in film education and showcasing in our country. Now we aim to become one of the main windows for refreshing and innovative films from all over the world with the monthly, La Filmoteca Short Film Fest. This is a unique and carefully curated festival with monthly screenings set around different types of shorts and a final Best of the Best celebration in December.

With live screenings to large audiences at the historic Sala Garbo Cinema in Costa Rica, we provide up and coming filmmakers with the chance to participate in the discussion, learning and watching of films. We work along several media outlets and even if you can’t travel to Costa Rica we will have directos and producers join us for QA’s with our enthusiastic audience of film buffs.

We cover over 100 films per year with a selection of close to 10 shorts per month, all competing for the best short of the month and the Best of the Best Award. The Festival becomes a window and place of meeting for the Costa Rican film-making community.
The festival is open to any film in any genre under 30 minutes in length, in an ever changing and dynamic set of themes.

The festival is held at Sala Garbo, an historical Independent Cinema founded in 1977 by Carmen Naranjo, Sergio Ramírez, Samuel Rovinski, Antonio Yglesias, Oscar Castillo and Nicholas Baker. After that, Sir Nicholas Baker took over and kept bringing high quality art cinema from all over the world.

In 1987 Nico Baker inaugurated the adjacent Laurence Olivier Theater and the Shakespeare gallery/restaurant, right next to the Sala Garbo Cinema, with the goal to create a complex devoted to art and culture in San José, Costa Rica. The theater has been a house to a wide variety of plays, concerts, dance and more.

Sala Garbo has stayed a family owned business over time. Isabella Mesalles Baker, the granddaughter of Nico Baker, is running the theater now. The story of Costa Rican culture is still being written.