Cine Pobre Film Festival

Cine Pobre Film Festival is devoted to self-funded cinema, which it presents as “The World’s Best Self Funded Films”. It treats cine pobre as a genre without stylistic rules or format limits, shared by filmmakers who tell their stories with their own resources; the term was defined in 2002 by Roger Bunn and J. Michael Seyfert after Jean Cocteau’s remark that film becomes art only when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper. The festival accepts only self-funded films and some crowd-financed ones, in any genre and language: short films up to 59 minutes, features of 60 to 110 minutes and student films.

Cine Pobre is not a competition: each year it publishes an official selection rather than ranking films. The festival is based in San Mateo Río Hondo, Oaxaca, Mexico, where its 22nd edition opened a small cinema in the cloud forest in August 2024. It has discontinued public screenings and now works as an invitation-only private venue. The dates of the 25th edition are 8–9 May 2027.