Montgomery Film Festival returns to Capri Theatre in August 2026

Montgomery Film Festival is staking its claim on the city’s film calendar again, returning August 7-9, 2026 to the historic Capri Theatre. The move keeps the festival tied to one of central Alabama’s most important screening rooms and signals that Montgomery still has a durable independent-film hub built around curation, community, and repeat audiences.

Filmmakers can already submit through FilmFreeway. The 2026 timeline is set: opening date March 10, regular deadline May 15, late deadline June 5, and notification date July 9. The festival’s submission listing says it is open to narrative shorts, documentary shorts, experimental shorts, music videos, and feature films, with short-film entries running up to 45 minutes. That range puts the emphasis squarely on discovery, not just premieres, and it gives Alabama creators a clear path into a lineup that also looks beyond state lines.

The Capri Theatre gives that ambition a grounded home. The building opened in July 1941 as the Clover Theatre, was remodeled and renamed the Capri in December 1962, and has been operated by the Capri Community Film Society since 1983. The theatre’s official history calls it Montgomery’s only independent cinema and the longest continually operating movie theatre in Alabama. It was saved in 1982 by neighbors who formed the Capri Community Film Society, purchased by the society in 2010, and owned free and clear by 2013 after fundraising helped secure digital projection and keep the venue viable.

That institutional backbone helps explain why the festival has become more than a weekend of screenings. Its own programming history stretches from short films from around the world since 2009 to feature-length titles as well, and its 2025 edition at the Capri included Alabama Ties shorts, Sun Ra: Do the Impossible, Mulholland Drive, Fanboy, Dead Lover, Strange Visions, and Cloud. The festival also pushed into music culture this spring, when its Music Video Cinema series with Village Green Records screened Hype Williams’ Belly at the Capri Theatre on March 19 at 7 p.m.

For Montgomery and the wider Central Alabama film community, the 2026 return says the same thing the Capri has been saying for decades: this is a place where filmmakers, audiences, and local partners keep building something that lasts.