Housed across from Harvard Yard in the basement of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts – the only building designed primarily by Le Corbusier in all of North America – the Harvard Film Archive has a 188-seat cinema open to the general public for screenings. Their calendar is programmed by Archive staff, guest curators, and occasionally by Harvard undergrads, showing films in 35mm, 16mm, Super 8, DCP, and various video formats. 

Programming at the HFA includes films from diverse countries and eras, with a focus on East Asia, Africa, Latin America, classical Hollywood, and experimental cinema. Notable guests over the past decade have included filmmakers such as Sophia Coppola, Pedro Costa, and Wim Wenders.

The cinema is the public-facing component of a much larger archive housed within the Harvard Library, boasting a collection of tens of thousands of film prints plus other audiovisual elements, posters, historical documents, and other film ephemera. Drawing on these resources and broader inter-institution connections, the HFA shows films from its own collections and from the archives of other academic centers.