Founded in 1975, its mission is to preserve, present, distribute, and educate about film.

"[4] Facets maintains facilities in Chicago, where it was founded by Milos Stehlik as a non-profit film organization.

The brick-and-mortar space includes a single-screen movie theater (referred to as Facets Cinémathèque), which screens "interesting" independent films[8] and "obscure" features.

[9] It also houses a video rental store that offers home delivery with over 65,000 titles,[4] described as "a stunningly deep archive of every kind of experimental, avant-garde, foreign and children's film you could hope to find.

[13] Facets has distributed films by directors such as Bela Tarr, Jean-Luc Godard, Miloš Forman, Věra Chytilová, Amos Gitai, Alexander Kluge, Andrzej Zulawski, and Miklós Jancsó.