The Metro Theatre Center Foundation supports a wide range of arts and social issues through its grants and support programs. These include the arts, especially filmmaking, theater, individual grants to artists working on passion projects, as well as social issues such as endangered youth and low income seniors.

For the past five years, our focus at The Metro Theatre Center Foundation has been film preservation and the struggle to save our film and visual heritage in a world when so much of it is being lost every day. History is prologue someone once said. To better understand the world we live in, the more we need to understand the past.

What better way to understand the recent past than through the motion pictures that have been created since the dawn of filmmaking more than 125 years ago.

What most of the general public does not understand is that motion pictures (our collective history and consciousness) cannot withstand the test of time, and can easily be lost without our tender loving care, and without experts in film preservation being involved.

For these reasons, we have focused a great deal of our funding and support in this area of endeavor, working with the world’s foremost organizations specializing in film restoration, preservation and presentation:

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Archives
The UCLA Film and Television Archives
The University of South Carolina
The University of North Carolina School of the Arts
The Internet Archive
The Center For Asian American Media