The timing couldn’t be richer. At the opening night VIP cocktail party for the 35th Starz Denver film festival, Denver Film Society executive director Tom Botelho announced that the Anna and John J. Sie Foundation had given $2.5 million to the arts organization. With the room full of raised champagne glasses, John Sie said, “It’s a pleasure to be able to help,”

With the news, the organization finally owns its home.

The Sies have donated $1.5 million outright, and the remaining million is a five-year, low-interest loan.

Denver residents John Sie, founder and retired chairman of the Starz Entertainment Group, and his wife, Anna Maglione Sie, have long been supporters of the organization that hosts the annual film festival and presents programs year-round at the Denver FilmCenter/Colfax.

The Denver FilmCenter/Colfax will be renamed the Anna Sie and John J. Sie FilmCenter, or Sie FilmCenter for short. Its largest theater will be christened the Maria and Tommaso Maglione Theater, in honor of Anna Sie’s parents.

“Film has been a very important ingredient in our success,” John Sie said recently while sitting with Anna in the Henderson Lounge at the Denver FilmCenter/Colfax. “What better way to give back than to give to something that is relevant to us? We started that when I was at Starz. We see the progress the film society has made, and we want to encourage it. The grant ensures them a trajectory in which Denver can become a shining star in film.”

Two years ago, the Denver Film Society moved its theater operations from the Auraria campus to the three-screen theater in the Lowenstein complex on East Colfax Avenue near the Tattered Cover Book Store and Twist & Shout record store.

Soon after signing a two-year lease for the space with Frank Schultz’s Tavern Hospitality Group in October 2010, the Denver Film Society launched Phase 1 of a $6 million capital campaign. The goal of the first phase was to raise $3.5 million to purchase the theater and pay for new digital projectors, signage and renovations.

Botelho said the campaign had logged major commitments before the society asked the Sies to become the lead donors. “Before we went to them we already had a million dollars in commitments.”

Among the major donors are Michael and Amber Fries, Robert and Liane Clasen, Mary Caulkins and Karl Kister, James Bunch and Linda Petrie Bunch, Luisa and Chris Law, Mark and Maxine Rossman, Barbara Bridges, and the Boettcher Foundation.

Moving to the Lowenstein complex from the Auraria campus has been a boon. The theater has fewer screens, but the multiplex is better situated in relationship to the city.

“We’ve had a 40 percent increase in membership since opening the Denver FilmCenter/Colfax,” Botelho said. “Our box office saw a 30 percent increase in that first year. In our second year of operation, we’re up another 10 percent.”

The Lowenstein complex was seen by the city and neighborhood organizations as central to the revitalization of a once-sketchy stretch of East Colfax. Community groups view the FilmCenter as an important player in that turnaround.

“The Lowenstein site was always the right place for the Denver Film Society. But it’s taken us a while to get here,” said Denver City Councilwoman Jeanne Robb, whose district includes a stretch of the East Colfax corridor. The community vision for part of East Colfax, near East High School, included a future recreation center and the Lowenstein in what would be the “town center of East Colfax,” she said.

Gov. John Hickenlooper, a long-time champion of film in Colorado, called the Sies’ gift “yet another example of John and Anna’s incredible generosity.”

In 2000, Starz Entertainment donated $5 million to help establish the Starz FilmCenter on the Auraria campus, a joint venture between the film society and the University Colorado Denver College of Arts & Media. The gift meant the film society could launch year-round programming. That was also the year the festival became the Starz Denver International Film Festival.

In 2007, Anna Sie endowed the Starz Denver festival’s Maria and Tomasso Maglione Italian Filmmaker Award



.

“I came to this country from Italy in 1955,” said Sie, who has a deep and enduring knowledge of classic Italian cinema, “and I left a very small town where you would have a movie there for two or three months. If you’ve ever seen ‘Cinema Paradiso,’ in the beginning I thought it was my town. That’s exactly how we were.”

This year’s recipients of the $10,000 honorarium are Paolo and Vittorio Taviani.

Phase 2 of the Denver Film Society’s capital campaign is set to launch next fall, with the aim of raising $2.5 million to fund an endowment.

“If there’s one thing I want people to take away from this,” Hickenlooper said, “now’s the time to give more money to the FilmCenter and the film festival. We already have one of the better film festivals in the country. We should put our shoulders to it and help it become one of the very best. The best gifts are the ones that attract other gifts, and that’s what this is.”

Meanwhile, Botelho already knows his marketing hook for the multiplex once it’s renamed and the signage goes up.

“See you at the Sie,” he said.

Lisa Kennedy: 303-954-1567, lkennedy@denverpost.com or twitter.com/bylisakennedy