El Paso and the Big Bend: every independent screen a filmmaker can book.
Updated: 1 day ago
El Paso has no independent movie theater. It has something arguably better for a filmmaker: two festivals that put cash behind local work, a digital cinema of about 200 seats inside the city’s performing arts center, and a cultural center and an art museum that both host free festival screenings. The Big Bend, three hours east, has no cinema either. It has the Crowley in Marfa, a nonprofit that lends its 168 seats at no charge to anyone serving the area with public programming.
This is the El Paso and Big Bend edition of the statewide directory. Every entry was checked against the venue’s own website on September 4, 2026. Published rates are linked, not repeated. Anything not on the venue’s site is not stated here.
The festivals that pay.
Plaza Classic Film Festival, run by the El Paso Community Foundation, held its nineteenth edition July 16 to 26, 2026 across the Plaza and the Philanthropy. Its Local Flavor section, sponsored by CreativElPaso and the Texas Film Commission, screens regional features, shorts, and documentaries at the Plaza on the festival’s final day, with $1,500, $1,000, and $750 for first through third and $250 for the audience favorite. The 2026 deadline has passed; the next cycle is July 2027, and the Local Flavor page is where it opens. For a regional filmmaker, a 2,000-seat picture palace on a festival’s closing day is the best room in West Texas.
The El Paso Film Festival, September 24 to 26, 2026, screens at the Philanthropy Theatre, the Plaza, the Mexican American Cultural Center, and the El Paso Museum of Art. Its submissions page lists up to $5,000 in cash prizes, including a $500 El Paso Filmmaker Award for work that flags Shot in El Paso in the cover letter. Films must have been completed after January 1, 2023. Shorts and features are accepted as digital files, and features may also send Blu-ray. AI-generated films are ineligible; AI as a creative tool is acceptable, in the festival’s own words. It falls on the same weekend as Lubbock’s Flatland Film Festival, which is in the Panhandle edition; a West Texas film can only be in one room that weekend.
Femme Frontera, founded in 2016 by women and gender-expansive filmmakers from El Paso, Las Cruces, and Juárez, ran June 6 and 7 this year, per the Texas Film Commission’s listing. Its venue was not stated there.
The rooms you can rent.
The Plaza Theatre and the Philanthropy Theatre are the city-owned performing arts complex downtown, managed by El Paso Live. The Plaza seats about 2,000. The Philanthropy is the room that matters here: a digital cinema of about 200 seats on one level (the two operators’ pages say 191 and 200), with IATSE stagehands available, the room both festivals use for intimate screenings. Rental goes through the performances and concerts page and booking@destinationelpaso.com. Rates are not published. Projection equipment is not itemized on the Philanthropy’s tech page; the festivals screen digital files there, so ask what the chain is.
The El Paso Mexican American Cultural Center is a city facility with a 200-seat auditorium and a 180-capacity black box, both listed with projector and screen. Host an Event requires a request at least twelve weeks ahead, director approval, and a custom contract; there is no set package and no published price. No food or drink in the main auditorium. The center also takes quarterly gallery proposals with an honorarium and runs an artist-in-residence program, which are separate doors for a media artist.
The El Paso Museum of Art hosts screenings for both festivals, free ones for the El Paso Film Festival. Its own host your event page rents select spaces with eight weeks’ notice preferred, a tenant liability policy required, mandatory museum security, and a prohibition on commercial sales and fundraisers. Its site does not describe a screening room. A ticketed benefit would not qualify under those rules as written; a free screening might. Contact is EPMArentals@elpasotexas.gov.
The UTEP Union Cinema seats 390 with HD projection and 7.1 sound, and it is marketed for film screenings. An outside filmmaker cannot book it directly. The page for outside groups says every outside request starts with a Facility Request Form and goes through UTEP’s University Events office, which decides eligibility and space. Rates for outside groups are not published.
The Big Bend.
The Crowley Theater in Marfa is a 501(c)(3) with 168 fixed seats and a policy that reads like nowhere else in the state: the only performance space within 300 miles that is available at no charge to groups and individuals serving the area with accessible public programming. Booking is by email to info@crowleytheater.org, at the directors’ sole discretion, and the venue has no staff. You bring your own crew, and the technical director decides which operators you can hire. CineMarfa, a separate nonprofit, programs free year-round screenings here and pays visiting artists a stipend; its contact is cinemarfa@gmail.com. Being programmed by CineMarfa means being paid, not paying.
Two organizations program the Crowley, and they are the real doors. CineMarfa, founded in 2011, says it prioritizes artist-made, archival, experimental, documentary, and narrative work, keeps all of its programming free, and has paid every visiting artist a stipend under W.A.G.E. guidelines since 2016. It posted no 2026 festival dates or submission process when checked. Ballroom Marfa, the contemporary arts nonprofit, ran Space Sightings, seven Sunday film screenings at the Crowley from March to May 2025, and publishes no submission path; info@ballroommarfa.org is the contact. The Crowley’s own events page stops in 2019, so the programmers’ calendars, not the venue’s, are where you confirm the room is active. The Marfa Film Festival has been paused since 2019.
The Granada Theatre in Alpine is a 1929 movie palace run as an event venue that programs film and lists movie screenings on its private events page, by tour and custom proposal. Its house projector and screen are also available as an equipment rental delivered within fifty miles of Alpine, which covers Marfa, Fort Davis, and Marathon. That is how you build an off-site Big Bend screening.
Call before you count on it.
Rangra Theatres in Alpine, two screens, is listed as open on Cinema Treasures and has no website that could be found. It needs a phone call. The Pecos State Theater, reported at 806 seats under owners who have had it since 1999, has a domain that does not resolve. The Alamo Drafthouse in El Paso hosts local screenings and belongs to Sony.
Two places people will suggest to you that are not screens: the Starlight Theatre in Terlingua has been a restaurant and bar since 1991, in a 1930s movie house, and the Hotel Saint George in Marfa lists meetings and retreats and no screening room on its site.
Every chain multiplex in the region is Cinemark, Flix, AMC, Premiere, or Alamo. The independent path in El Paso is a festival, and the two festivals are good enough that this is not a complaint.
If your film is not finished yet, that is the part we do. For filmmakers explains how.
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