PICTUREHOUSE Cinemas, owners of City Screen, York, is launching a new cross-arts initiative, the Screen Arts Festival.

Showcasing a wide range of the arts – ballet, opera, plays and concerts, pre-recorded and live – the festival also features related films, documentaries and special events, all programmed by festival programmer Paul Ridd into themed strands between next Friday and August 11.

Ballet highlights include the August 1 British premiere of a new restoration of Nureyev and Fonteyn: Swan Lake, featuring the classic partnership of Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn, filmed by Austrian director Truck Branns at the Vienna State Opera House in 1966.

On July 30, the UK premiere of American documentary maker Anne Bass’s inspiring Dancing Across Borders chronicles the meteoric rise of Seattle Ballet teenage dance prodigy Sokvannara Sar. While holidaying in Cambodia, Bass had spotted Sar’s untapped talent and invited him to the United States to train with dance legend Olga Kostritzky.

Dancing Dreams, Rainer Hoffman’s German documentary on legendary choreographer Pina Bausch’s creation of the surreal dance-hall drama Kontakthof, will be shown on August 4.

The opera strand boasts three productions from the New York Met Opera season: Puccini’s tragic Tosca on August 4; Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, starring Patricia Racette in Anthony Minghella’s production, on August 8; and Donizetti’s comic opera La Fille du Régiment, on August 10.

Jonathan Kent’s 2010 production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni at Glyndebourne will be screened on July 31; the concert film The Three Tenors – Legends will bring back memories of the July night in 1990 when Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras met on stage at the Baths of Caracalla in Rome and became the Three Tenors, in a screening on August 3.

Enrico Castiglone’s new production of Verdi’s gloriously melodramatic Nabucco will be broadcast live from Teatro Antico Taormina in Sicily, featuring Juan Pons in the lead role, on August 9.

Theatre highlights include next Friday’s one-off repeat show of the National Theatre’s production of Chekhov’s darkly humorous The Cherry Orchard.

Three Shakespeare productions from the Globe Theatre in London will be aired: Dominic Dromgoole’s productions of Henry IV Part I on August 6 and Henry IV Part II on August 7, and a third outing for fat knight Sir John Falstaff in Christopher Luscombe’s The Merry Wives Of Windsor on August 11.

The festival also has a strong film strand, led by a live satellite question-and-answer session with Sir David Attenborough on July 30, after the debut cinema screening of Matthew Dyas’s BAFTA-winning documentary about flying dinosaurs, Flying Monsters.

The festival’s strand devoted to Shakespeare’s Falstaff accommodates Orson Welles’s lost masterpiece, Chimes At Midnight (PG), in which he plays the lecherous knight. This 1965 film will be screened in a newly restored version on August 1 before its DVD release.

Two visually ravishing films about Renaissance art will be featured, the first being the British premiere of Lech Majewski’s haunting, impressionistic Swedish study of Pieter Bruegel, The Mill And The Cross, on July 31. Rutger Hauer plays the Renaissance master as he constructs his 1564 painting The Road To Calvary. Next comes Nightwatching (18), Peter Greenaway’s bold take on the life of Flemish master Rembrandt van Rijn on August 3. Made it 2007, it focuses on the creation of Rembrandt’s 1642 painting The Night Watch.

Alex Stapleton’s documentary exploration of the life and career of maverick director Roger Corman, Corman’s World: Exploits Of A Hollywood Rebel, will receive its British premiere on July 30.

The festival opens on July 29 with Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark, a landmark 2002 film that encapsulates the event’s cross-arts policy in its joyous tribute to fine art, classical music, dance and pioneering cinematic technique.

As cinema buffs will recall, Sokurov used a single 96-minute Steadicam sequence shot to make his film.

• For details of the full festival programme, visit picturehouses.co.uk/cinema For tickets, phone 0871 902 5747 or book online.