| Industry | Film |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1977 |
| Founder | Bill Pence |
| Headquarters | New York City, New York, United States |
| Products | Motion pictures |
| Website | www |
Kino International is a film and video distributor, founded by Bill Pence in 1977. Donald Krim bought Kino just months after its founding and served as president of the company until his death from cancer in 2011. Kino, based in New York City, specializes in art house films, such as low-budget current films, classic films from earlier periods in the history of cinema, and world cinema. Similar in many respects to The Criterion Collection, the home video releases by Kino are usually restored versions with substantial supplementary material. In 2009, Kino International merged with Lorber HT Digital to form Kino Lorber.
Kino's theatrical arm handles theatrical distribution of much of the Janus Collection, and has a focus on recent art house and foreign films. Their non-theatrical arm has more of a focus on classic cinema, providing silent film classics which are otherwise difficult to find. They are the largest video distributor of silent films[citation needed], including a great many from the earliest days of cinema (before 1914). These include important early landmark films by Thomas Edison, Georges Méliès, the Lumière brothers and D.W. Griffith. Many of those were restored by David Shepard's Film Preservation Associates.[1]
In 2009, Kino International merged with Lorber HT Digital to form Kino Lorber.[2] Kino International remains that company's imprint for world cinema titles, as well as American independents, documentaries, international classics, and silent cinema. The other Kino Lorber imprints are Lorber Films, Alive Mind, Knitting Factory Entertainment, KL Studio Classics (which releases titles from the libraries of major Hollywood studios including Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Universal Pictures) and Kino Lorber Animation (which has produced home-video releases of all of the cartoons in the Pink Panther cartoon series as well as its spinoffs, such as The Inspector and The Ant and the Aardvark).
In 2017, Kino Lorber announced a distribution partnership with the Australian preschool band The Wiggles for DVDs in the United States and Canada.[3]