The Los Angeles International Film Exposition, also called Filmex, was an annual Los Angeles film festival held in the 1970s and early 1980s. It was the predecessor of the American Film Institute's Los Angeles International Film Festival. After the final Filmex festival in 1983, the founders/organizers of the festival (Gary Abrahams and Gary Essert) devoted their attentions to developing a new nonprofit cultural organization, the American Cinematheque,[1] which they created to be a permanent year-round film festival in Los Angeles.