San Francisco Silent Film Festival

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival is a film festival first held in 1996 and presented annually at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco, California, USA. It is the largest silent film festival in the United States, although the largest silent film festival in the world remains the Giornate del cinema muto in Pordenone, northern Italy.

The 21st annual festival will be held June 2 to June 5, 2016 at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco.

The 16th Annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival was held at the Castro Theatre July 14–17, 2011, featuring 18 programs of films and presentations, all with live accompaniment by the foremost silent film musicians in the world. The festival opened with the new restoration of Upstream (1927) directed by John Ford and brought back last year to the U.S. from the New Zealand Film Archive, where it was discovered. As part of a collaboration between the Silent Film Festival and the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Matti Bye Ensemble performed three original commissioned scores to Mauritz Stiller's The Blizzard, Herbert Ponting's The Great White Silence, and the Closing Night Film, Victor Sjöström's He Who Gets Slapped. The festival's Visiting Director was Alexander Payne.

On July 14, 2011, the Silent Film Festival announced their presentation, in association with American Zoetrope, The Film Preserve, Photoplay Productions, and British Film Institute, of Abel Gance's Napoleon in March 2012 at the Paramount Theatre Oakland. The presentation features the U.S. premiere of the complete restoration by Kevin Brownlow and the U.S. premiere of Carl Davis' orchestral score, with Davis conducting members of the Oakland East Bay Symphony. The film's famous triptych sequences was shown in full Polyvision, with three simultaneous projectors and a 70-foot screen. Napoleon had not been screened theatrically in the U.S. with live orchestra for nearly 30 years.

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