Walk past 8633 Colesville Road this weekend and you'd have seen a line for Michael Keaton in a rubber batsuit, projected on a 41-foot screen the way it was built to be seen: on 70mm film, with the grain and the depth that a digital file can't fake. Walk past the same marquee on September 16 and the crowd will be different. So will the language on some of the posters. So will the reason people are lining up: not for a rerelease, but for the U.S. premiere of a film that hasn't screened anywhere else in this country yet.
Same building. Same three auditoriums. Same 88-year-old projection booth, more or less. What changes, almost overnight, is what the theater is for. That range is the actual story of AFI Silver this month, and it's easy to miss if you only think of the place as "the art house on Colesville Road" or "where they show old movies."
The Weekend That Just Ended
Through September 13, AFI Silver ran a 70mm double feature: "Batman" (1989) and "Aliens," both struck from film prints rather than digital scans. That's not a small technical footnote. Auditorium 1, the theater's largest, seats 400 people and carries a screen that measures 41 by 18 feet, big enough to be the DC area's third-largest commercial movie screen and the second-largest outside the Smithsonian. It's also one of the few screens in the region still equipped with working 70mm projectors, which is why revival programming like this draws people from well outside Montgomery County. You don't run a 70mm print unless you have the hardware, the trained projectionists, and an audience that cares about the difference. AFI Silver has kept all three.
What Starts On September 16
Three days after the last 70mm screening, the marquee turns over completely for the 37th annual AFI Latin American Film Festival, running through October 7. This isn't a modest sidebar series. This year's lineup includes 43 films from 21 countries, with 12 receiving their U.S. or North American premiere at AFI Silver specifically, meaning this is the first place in the country audiences can see them. The festival opens with "The Match," a documentary built from archival footage and new testimony about the 1986 World Cup match between Argentina and England, narrated in part by former players Gary Lineker and Jorge Valdano. It closes on October 7 with Pedro Almodóvar's "Bitter Christmas," which reunites the director with Argentine actor Leonardo Sbaraglia.
In between, the festival includes Manuela Martelli's "The Meltdown," a coming-of-age thriller set in post-Pinochet Chile, and "Ashes," an immigration drama following a young Mexican woman who travels to Spain with her brother to reunite with the mother who left them behind as children. Washington City Paper's festival preview flagged a handful of titles worth watching for beyond the opening and closing selections: "La Perra," a Chilean film whose canine performer won the Palm Dog Award at Cannes this year, and "The Red Hangar," a black-and-white Chilean thriller that follows one army captain through the day of the 1973 coup. The paper's own framing was that this year's slate keeps circling the same theme in different forms: family, animals, and countries, and what happens when any of them start to come apart.
The timing isn't incidental. The festival runs inside National Hispanic Heritage Month, and organizers have built in embassy-hosted receptions and in-person conversations with visiting filmmakers alongside the screenings, plus a handful of films from Spain and Portugal that broaden the festival's frame to Ibero-American cinema generally rather than strictly Latin American.
Why One Building Can Hold Both
None of this happens by accident, and none of it was guaranteed. The Silver Theatre opened on this same site in 1938, a 1,100-seat Art Deco house designed by movie palace architect John Eberson and originally owned by Warner Bros. It closed in 1985 and sat empty for sixteen years. Richard Striner, a founder of the Art Deco Society of Washington, spent nineteen years campaigning to save the building before Montgomery County agreed in 1998 to negotiate with the American Film Institute about reopening it. Restoration, led by the Washington-based firm Gensler & Associates and funded entirely by the county under then-executive Douglas M. Duncan, took five years and cost twenty million dollars. The theater reopened on April 4, 2003, with a gala screening of a restored "The Oxbow Incident" and Clint Eastwood on hand to accept the AFI Silver Legacy Award.
That history is why the building can pull off a week like this one. The 70mm hardware in Auditorium 1 survived the restoration on purpose, which is why revival programming still works here in a way it doesn't at most theaters built or renovated in the last twenty years. The three-auditorium layout, with a 200-seat second house and a 75-seat third, gives the AFI Latin American Film Festival room to run 43 films across three weeks without displacing everything else on the calendar. As of 2017, the theater was already screening upward of 600 movies a year across all three rooms. A single-screen multiplex couldn't do a 70mm blockbuster weekend and a 43-film international festival back to back. This one can, because the county rebuilt it to.
What's Worth Knowing If You're Planning Around It
A few practical notes for anyone treating AFI Silver as a regular stop rather than a once-a-year outing:
- The festival runs September 16 through October 7, 2026, with individual film schedules and ticket links posted on AFI Silver's own festival page as showtimes are added week to week.
- General admission and AFI member pricing apply as with any other AFI Silver screening, and several of the festival's higher-profile titles are paired with post-screening filmmaker Q&As rather than standard showings.
- The calendar doesn't stop at October 7. Noir City DC follows October 8 through 22, and the AFI Silver Classic Film Weekend, co-curated with film historian David Pierce, runs November 12 through 15 with new restorations, silent films accompanied live, and 35mm prints.
- The theater sits near the Silver Spring Metro station on the Red Line, which matters if you're weighing a festival weekend against parking downtown.
The Actual Takeaway
It's tempting to file AFI Silver under one category: the place with the old movies, or the place with the foreign films, or the place that does the occasional Batman revival for the nostalgia crowd. What actually happened this month argues against picking just one. The same screen that ran a comic book movie's original film print on September 13 will run a Chilean coup drama's North American premiere within days, and both are the same institution doing what it was rebuilt to do in 2003: hold as much of film history and film's present as three auditoriums and one very good projection booth can carry.
If you live near Colesville Road, that's less a trivia fact than a standing invitation. The theater's range only shows up if you keep checking the calendar instead of assuming you already know what's playing.
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