“Pretty Big Get For Orinda”: A Major SF Film Festival Has Moved To Orinda Theatre This Week

ORINDA, CALIFORNIA – The Orinda Theatre’s neon tower is glowing a little brighter this week.

A major San Francisco film institution has decamped from the city and set up shop right in downtown Orinda, and as one of our readers told us, it’s “a pretty big get for Orinda.”

From Wednesday, November 12 through Sunday, November 16, the 28th San Francisco Silent Film Festival is taking place not at its longtime San Francisco home, but entirely at the historic Orinda Theatre.

A San Francisco institution heads east

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival is the largest silent film festival in the United States, long based at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco.

But with the Castro closed into early 2026 for a massive, multimillion-dollar renovation, several marquee film events have been forced to find temporary homes.

For 2025, the Silent Film Festival chose Orinda, relocating five full days of screenings, live musical performances, and special programs to the Art Deco landmark just over the hill.

Festival organizers describe this year’s edition as 22 programs of “live cinema” on a single big screen, all with live musical accompaniment, turning Orinda Theatre into a kind of time machine back to the 1910s and 1920s for one long weekend.

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Why Orinda Theatre was the perfect choice

For movie lovers, Orinda Theatre is hardly a consolation prize. Built in 1941, the 750-seat Art Deco showplace is already one of the Bay Area’s most beloved movie houses, known for its towering neon blade sign, elaborate murals, and thriving calendar of classic-film events.

Earlier this year, global culture site Time Out named Orinda Theatre one of the 25 most beautiful cinemas in the world. Now it is getting an international audience of cinephiles, archivists, and musicians, many of whom normally spend festival week in the Castro neighborhood but are happily discovering coffee shops, wine bars, and restaurants around Orinda Theatre Square instead.

The location is practical, too. The theater sits a short walk from Orinda BART and next to a 250-space garage where festivalgoers can validate for several hours of free parking, something that is increasingly rare at big city festivals.

What’s playing: from Chaplin to a “lost” Paramount comedy

Opening night celebrates the 100th anniversary of Charlie Chaplin’s “The Gold Rush,” with a new live score led by maestro Timothy Brock and performed by musicians from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

Over the five days, the schedule ranges from canonical favorites to ultra-rare restorations:

• A newly reconstructed 1926 Paramount comedy, “The New Klondike,” long thought to be incomplete until archivists discovered and pieced together intact elements in the studio’s vaults
• Buster Keaton’s “Go West,” closing the festival in proper Keaton style.
• Numerous international silents, shorts programs, and talks about film preservation work, giving fans a peek behind the scenes at how archivists rescue fragile nitrate prints.

Every screening features live music, from solo accompanists to full ensembles, which is a big part of why the festival has such a devoted local and international following.

How to go

Tickets and all-festival passes are being sold directly by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. The full schedule, showtimes, and ticket links are posted on the festival’s website, and Orinda Theatre’s events page is directing moviegoers to the same information.

For East Bay residents, getting there is straightforward:

• Take BART to Orinda station and walk over the pedestrian bridge toward Theatre Square.
• If you are driving, use the Theatre Square garage next to the cinema; festival patrons can get extended free parking with validation before rates kick in.

Once inside, expect a mix of local fans, visiting film scholars, and out-of-towners who may be experiencing Orinda for the first time. Given the festival’s pedigree and the Castro’s ongoing renovation, it is not hard to see why people in town are calling the move a pretty big get.

What it means for Orinda and the 925

Hosting a major San Francisco-branded festival gives Orinda Theatre and the surrounding businesses a rare shot of regional and even international attention. For a few days, the center of the Bay Area film world is not in the city at all, but in a small hillside town one BART tunnel away.

If this year goes well, it could strengthen the East Bay’s case as a long-term partner for high-profile film events, even after the Castro reopens in 2026.

For now, though, the focus is on the here and now: five days of luminous black-and-white images, live music, and a neon tower lighting up the November sky.

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