Distribution
Filming Othello was first shown at the 1978 Berlin Film Festival. It was first screened in the U.S. in 1979 at the Public Theater in New York, where it played on a double bill with Othello. However, the film’s presentation did not receive newspaper reviews. Filming Othello had no further U.S. screenings until it returned to New York in 1987 for an engagement at the Film Forum, a nonprofit cinema, and that presentation was acknowledged by Vincent Canby of The New York Times as "entertaining and revealing" and "full of priceless anecdotes."
To date, Filming Othello has never been theatrically released or presented on home video. The film has been kept out of circulation due to a dispute between the filmmaker’s daughter, Beatrice Welles (who owns the rights to Othello) and Oja Kodar, the Croatian actress and Welles’s companion and collaborator in his later years (who owns the rights to Filming Othello). Specifically, since the 1991 restoration of "Othello" overseen by Beatrice Welles, she has not allowed any footage of her father's original version of "Othello" to be shown in any context, and as "Filming Othello" contains many clips of "Othello", its circulation has been effectively blocked. Film critic and historian Jonathan Rosenbaum has accused Beatrice Welles of being motivated solely by profit in this decision, since she can only claim royalties from the restored version of "Othello", and has thus ensured that only 'her' version (which he believes to be inferior) is available.
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