Cultivate Cinema Circle

Cultivate Cinema Circle was conceived in 2015 as Buffalo's premier film series for new and classic art films and documentaries in the spirit of traditional community funded film societies like Amos Vogel's groundbreaking Cinema 16 or Richard Linklater's massively successful Austin Film Society. Since then we've hosted 90+ screenings at 9 venues around the city of Buffalo: North Park Theatre, Amherst Theatre, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Arts Center, Burning Books, Dreamland, Sugar City, Canisius College's Science Hall Atrium and the Mason O. Damon Auditorium at Buffalo & Erie County's Downtown Central Library.

Our mission is to help foster a healthy, fervent film culture in the Buffalo area by presenting the best that cinema has to offer—works selected for their excellence, cultural diversity, political relevance and historic value. In doing so, we hope to provide a space for public engagement, community discussion and celebration of empathy via the seventh art.


The series is curated and presented by Jordan M. Smith, public librarian and film journalist for DOC NYC, Senses of Cinema and Nonfics, and Jared Mobarak, graphic designer and film critic at The Film Stage and BuffaloVibe.

Screening films is unfortunately not a cheap endeavor, especially when the series itself is a passion project we do in our spare time for the love of the art. We've been very lucky to have some supportive local businesses sponsor the majority of our screenings, but we would love to scale the series up a bit to bring more high quality films, more filmmaker visits and more cinema related events. In order to do this, more funding than we've been able to raise thus far is needed.

This is where we hope you can come in to help us ensure Cultivate Cinema Circle's programming remains intact for the foreseeable future by becoming a part of that community tradition we've strove to create around Buffalo's film culture. Our goal is to raise at least $450 a month to cover the basics of film licensing, advertising, and securing future filmmaker visits as we've done in the past. We are offering three levels of support with various benefits and any contribution would be a great help toward guaranteeing a bright future for watching movies on the big screen here in Buffalo!