On May 10, 1968, the Cannes Film Festival shuddered to a stop when filmmakers including Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut rushed the stage at the Palais des Festivals to protest French New Waver Henri Langlois's removal from his post as president of the National Cinematheque Francaise. Also that month, in that same spirit of film lovers' activism, television documentary producers and spouses Philip and Mary-Ann Hobel founded and self-financed the nonprofit Cinema Guild. The couple had initially intended Cinema Guild to be a conduit through which to distribute documentaries they had themselves seen through every stage of production: e.g., the ten-part series "The Fabulous Sixties" and "The Sensational Seventies." But what began as a handful of collaboratively produced titles grew, by the late 1970s, to a library of 300 titles from a number of sources. With the couple's venture into rights acquisitions in the early 1980s (following their Oscar win for "Tender Mercies") and their launch of a theatrical division in the late 1990s, the collection has today grown to 1000-plus titles strong, with 30-50 new films added annually. This article features the Cinema Guild which, in its 40 years, has trained its klieg lights on various injustices and realities of the national and international stage, from the perils of illegal immigration to child labor in the developing world. The venerable film distributor sets the scene for a seamless splice into the digital age.