For six days in late October, the New Orleans Film Festival turns the city into what its organizers like to call an epicenter of cinema. The 37th edition runs Oct. 22-27, 2026, with 175 films screening in person at venues across town and a virtual program streaming through Nov. 1. It is a big festival with a small-festival feel, and this year it leans hard into the music and history that make New Orleans itself a kind of permanent film set.
The Contemporary Arts Center serves as the festival hub, with a box office, a bar and the free Filmmaker Conference, which this year moves entirely into the CAC on the LMP Studios Stage for workshops, live podcast recordings, lunch-and-learns and fireside chats. Screenings also unspool at the Prytania Theatre Uptown, the oldest single-screen movie house in Louisiana, and at The Broad Theater, where some screenings are pay-what-you-will. The Historic New Orleans Collection rounds out the venue list.
The festival opens Thursday, Oct. 22, with Victory, Dan Chace's documentary about Irma Thomas, the Soul Queen of New Orleans, built around a recording session in which she revisits her gospel roots. It is a fitting opener for a festival that has always treated local music as serious cinema. Thomas, born in Ponchatoula in 1941, had her first national R&B chart hit in 1960 at age 19 with "(You Can Have My Husband, But Please) Don't Mess with My Man," cut after she'd landed a recording contract while waiting tables in New Orleans. She went on to work with Allen Toussaint on classics like "It's Raining," recorded "Time Is on My Side" a year before the Rolling Stones covered it, and won her first Grammy in 2007 for After the Rain, made in the aftermath of losing her home to Hurricane Katrina. The screening is at 7:30 p.m. at the CAC, followed by an opening night party at Gallier Hall with music by Cha Wa, the brass-band-meets-Mardi-Gras-Indian outfit.
The music thread runs through the whole program. Michael Murphy's documentary Dew Drop Inn: Resistance and Resilience traces the history of the storied hotel and club that welcomed touring Black musicians under Jim Crow, hosting the likes of Ray Charles, Little Richard and Fats Domino, and became a landmark for R&B and civil rights. The film also covers the venue's restoration, and the Dew Drop itself hosts festival events, including a Sunday night party where Bobby Rush performs after the screening of King of the Chitlin Circuit, the documentary profiling him, at the CAC. On Friday night, DJ Jubilee presides over a bounce party at the CAC, a reminder that New Orleans's own dance-music tradition gets equal billing with the red-carpet stuff.
That red-carpet stuff is substantial. Martin McDonagh's Wild Horse Nine, one of two Centerpiece films, stars John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell as CIA agents sent to Easter Island ahead of the 1973 Chilean coup, screening 7:30 p.m. Monday at the Prytania. The other Centerpiece, La Bola Negra, earned Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo Best Director honors at Cannes in May and follows three gay men resisting homophobia across a century of Spanish history; it screens 8 p.m. Saturday at the CAC. Jesse Eisenberg's The Debut pairs Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti, with Moore as a New Jersey housewife who lands a community theater role and tries to live it, at 1 p.m. Sunday at the CAC. Helen Mirren plays a reclusive crime novelist in A Talent for Murder, 7:45 p.m. Friday at the Prytania, and Léa Seydoux stars in the French thriller Gentle Monster, 2:15 p.m. Saturday at the Prytania. Alice Voena directs and stars in Heaven Above Rowen, with John Cameron Mitchell appearing as one of the figures a queer cult leader meets in psychedelic visions, scored by Stephen Trask; it screens 8:15 p.m. Saturday at the CAC.
The New Orleans Film Society has been bringing independent cinema to the city since 1989, and the festival has grown into an Academy Award-qualifying event in the Documentary Short, Narrative Short and Animated Short categories. MovieMaker Magazine has ranked it among the "25 Coolest Film Festivals in the World" and its "Top 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee." Organizers expect more than 12,000 attendees and 250-plus filmmakers this year, with 53 of the 175 titles coming from Louisiana. Last year's edition was the biggest in the festival's history, and executive director Dodd Loomis has said the society used that momentum to "dream even bigger."
Tickets are $13-$20 for individual screenings, with festival passes also available; some Broad Theater screenings are pay-what-you-will. Standalone tickets went on sale to members in late September and to the general public Oct. 1. The full schedule, film descriptions and tickets are at neworleansfilmsociety.org.