San Francisco Documentary Festival

SF DocFest is a founding member of the FILM FESTIVAL ALLIANCE

MISSION & OBJECTIVE We screen the best documentaries from around the world at the Roxie Cinema, the oldest art house theater west of the Mississippi. Many of our titles end up with calendared runs at the Roxie later in the year. We get great press coverage in San Francisco, the second largest film market in the country, plus industry reviews.

San Francisco is a very receptive town for documentaries and our festivals have built a passionate following over the past 25 years.

All submissions are viewed by salaried programming professionals. We do not use AI or volunteer pre-screeners for evaluating films.

DocFest PRESS COVERAGE: https://sfindie.com/press-coverage

ABOUT SF DOCFEST SF DocFest is an annual festival devoted to documentary cinema. Since 2001, this event has brought the most weird and wonderful aspects of real life to the big screen.

"What makes the scrappy San Francisco Documentary Film Festival a treasure to SF Bay Area filmgoers is its willingness to take that extra step to show films a little more out there than bog standard documentaries." - Peter Wong, Broke Ass Stuart

“Docfest offers a zippy blend of politics, music, social issues and youth-oriented subcultures. The good news is that DocFest promotes documentaries as a vibrant, irreverent form of entertainment to a younger demographic, blasting the notion of educational films to smithereens. There’s no room for anything approximating — watch it, I’m about to blaspheme – the obsessively measured and utterly somnambulant musings of Ken Burns.” – Michael Fox, KQED

"What SF DocFest has offered over its more than two decades of programming is a transformation of audiences’ perceptions of what could be done with the documentary genre. Instead of thinking of watching documentaries as the celluloid equivalent of eating a trunkful of kale, lucky SF DocFest viewers have seen films that reward their curiosity about the world around them in intriguing and entertaining ways. " - Peter Wong, Broke Ass Stuart

“Since its inception, DocFest (May 31-June 15 at the Roxie and the Vogue, with opening night at Alamo Drafthouse) has compiled a colorful scrapbook of genuine characters in contrast to the current events survey, educational seminar or social-issue forum that defines many documentary series… There are one or two people in Off the Charts you won’t soon forget, which could be said about nearly every film in DocFest. That’s one of the pleasures of scrapbooks.” – also Michael Fox, KQED