For 30 years, Kino International has successfully navigated the treacherously shifting sands of the film distribution marketplace with intelligence, taste, and luck. The brainchild of Donald Krim, who, under the aegis of his uncle Arthur Krim, helped originate the first studio classics division at United Artists in the 1970s, Kino began life renting a print library of acknowledged cinema masterpieces such as Charles Chaplan’s “Modern Times.”

Once the company was successfully established in the theatrical film revival business, Kino began to acquire and distribute contemporary art house and foreign films as well. Today, after 30 years of distributing rare and classic films to the public, Mr. Krim and his associate, Gary Palmucci, still comb film festivals year round, essay emerging talents, and go head-to-head with other distributors for the chance to bet their tastes and the dollars that the films they acquire will sell tickets in theaters and have long afterlives on home video.

Starting today, 21 of the ripest fruits from their three decades of labors, both in the glitz of the Croisette in Cannes and the dimly lit chill of film archive vaults all over the world, will enjoy an exclusive theatrical engagement when the Film Society of Lincoln Center hosts “30 Years of Kino International” at the Walter Reade Theater.

A new print of Wong Kar-Wai’s “Fallen Angels” and an archival copy of Michel Haneke’s “The Piano Teacher” bear witness to Kino’s consistently eclectic and often prescient ability to “catch new talent on the rise before it becomes priced out of our range,” as Mr. Palmucci described his mission. On the archival side, the Lincoln Center tribute will also feature the theatrical debut of a new version of Fritz Lang’s 1928 film “Spies” that was culled from “about four or five different archives,” by Mr. Palmucci’s reckoning.

Messrs. Krim and Palmucci speak with the obvious affection of died-in-the-wool film aficionados, but just as much with the bottomline pragmatism they have acquired while romancing the shrinking theatrical film arena and the ever changing ancillary markets of DVD rentals, sales, and downloads. “We’re in the business of releasing films into theaters and providing the theater experience,” Mr. Krim said. “Unfortunately, the shelf life of a picture in theatrical release has contracted from what it would’ve been even five years ago.”

Every film distributor covets the stamp of legitimacy and potential critical attention that a theatrical run will give his film. A successful movie house engagement “definitely distinguishes a feature from a straight-to-video film in a very, very important way,” Mr. Krim said. “Even if it’s just six cities, it’s very important.”

Kino’s current theatrical release, Pascale Ferran’s acclaimed “Lady Chatterley,” is doing well in New York and Los Angeles, and will soon roll out to dozens of other markets. Their tent pole release of last year, Kelly Reichardt’s extravagantly well-reviewed “Old Joy,” ultimately ran in “at least a hundred markets,” Mr. Palmucci said. But the perfect movie palace world — in which “Chatterley,” a lush and sensual period novel adaptation, and a touching, keenly observed contemporary outdoor chamber piece like “Old Joy” can flourish financially — is not an economically realistic one.

“There’s no revenue for a film that opens in six markets,” Mr. Krim said. “There’s often no revenue for a film that opens in a hundred markets. That’s true of us and it’s true of our competitors like Sony Classics, Magnolia, and IFC. It’s true for the art market and for the studios, too. They lose money theatrically on two-thirds of the films they put out.”

Though loath to admit that a new film’s theatrical life has become a mere promotional appendage to a potentially lucrative life on home video, Mr. Krim is nevertheless sanguine about the realities of contemporary exhibition.

“You need to answer the question, ‘How do we consume film today as opposed to 20 years ago, 30 years ago, or 40 years ago?'” he said. “It’s not movie theaters.” The shift has been so pronounced that Kino’s video acquisitions vastly outnumber its theatrical slate. Kino On Video began in 1987 with a little more than two-dozen titles. Now, Mr. Krim says, “We release six or eight new films theatrically every year and we release 50 DVD titles every year.”

Nearly every film distributor, from Hollywood’s corporate players to HD Net and Magnolia’s Mark Cuban, has lately begun to experiment with the precise timing of movie-house and home-video premieres. Indeed, it won’t be long before every big-screen film is available on DVD the same day it arrives in theaters.

“There was a panel discussion at AMMI recently,” Mr. Palmucci said, “and the question was, what’s the perfect window now to release an art film? Is it day and date, is it one week, two weeks, one month, two months?”

Distributors with a corporate balance sheet on which to spread out their losses, or a cable network and theater chain like IFC and Mr. Cuban, can afford to experiment with same-day video and theater releases. Kino can’t. “That still doesn’t really work for our business model,” Mr. Palmucci said. “We can’t really shrink a theatrical and non-theatrical release. Our ideal window is closer to six months.”

Kino has explored its own version of direct-to-video sales by acquiring tried and tested recent foreign fare, such as the Thai thriller “Hit Man File” and the Russian gangster burlesque “Dead Man’s Bluff” exclusively for its video arm. It also continues to issue a wide range of classic films and restorations that are the results of years of carefully cultivated and maintained relationships with archives, museums, and copyright holders. Later this year, Kino will debut the DVD of Sergei Eisenstein’s canonical “Battleship Potemkin,” a film that was recently rescued from public domain dissolution by the combined efforts of three different national film archives.

And the future? “Download is here,” Mr. Krim said. “We’re going to start to make our stuff available for download to burn on disc by the end of the year. We’re going to start with probably 40 titles.”

If that sounds distinctly unromantic, Mr. Krim hopes that new technology will also assist in the acquisition and dissemination of more of cinemas lesser-known treasures. “When we get download going, it will become possible to put out more esoteric silent films because the costs are going to be so much less,” he said.

“And,” Mr. Palmucci deadpanned, “it will theoretically also become possible to watch one of the masterpieces of German silent cinema on your phone.”

Through July 12 (70 Lincoln Center Plaza at Broadway and West 65th Street, 212-875-5601).