The Festival du Cinéma Américain has run every September since 1975, taking over the casino's CID conference centre and the Morny cinema for ten days of American screenings, premieres, and red-carpet evenings. Unlike Cannes or Venice, the festival is non-competitive in its main strand — it is more an annual celebration of US film, with retrospectives, tributes and a competition for independent debut features.
For visitors who time their stay around it, the festival turns a quiet end-of-season town into something briefly glamorous: stars line up for autographs along the Planches, the Normandy lobby fills with American voices, and tickets to public screenings are easy to get. The complete programme appears in early August on the festival website. The shorter Asian Film Festival ran annually from 1999 until 2014 but no longer takes place.