Houston Cinema Arts Festival goes virtual for 2020

The Houston Cinema Arts Festival goes virtual

The Houston Cinema Arts Festival (HCAF) is an annual celebration of cinema and art. The festival typically hosts screenings of films and other cinematic experiences at various locations across Houston including the Museum of Fine Arts, Rice Cinema and White Oak Music Hall, among many others.

Despite challenges from the COVID-19 pandemic, the festival will occur this year in a mostly virtual format. Maintaining its cornerstones, this year’s festival includes oscar-buzzed headlining films, the NASA collaborative Cinespace film competition and discussions with filmmakers. 

The schedule for the festival is available on the HCAF website. Those interested in attending can obtain all-access passes for $50 or buy tickets to individual screenings. Some virtual screenings and events will be available for free.

“The biggest plus in the ability of the virtual space is being able to pull together people from all around the planet to have a conversation together,” said Jessica Green, artistic director of the Houston Cinema Arts Festival.

Various film screenings, musical celebrations, Q&A sessions, panel discussions and other special events will take place on the virtual platform. Drive-in theaters around Houston will host a handful of headlining films including “Mogul Mowgli,” “Ammonite” and “Shogun Assassin”. 

“I don’t want to be pollyannaish. You know, these are really rough times. I like to describe this time as terrifying, but pregnant with possibility. I think art is a really good tool for engaging that sort of moment in our lives,” Green said. “Art is a great tool to work through, escape, celebrate, laugh and cry at stuff. Not to downplay any of what is happening, but I think art is a tool that can really heal in difficult times.”

Programming for the 2020 festival

Each year, programming for the festival is united by a theme. The theme for this year’s festival is Urbana. 

“Based on the music genre of música Urbana, Urbana is about Afro-Latino identity, cultures, pathways and interminglings that happened vis-a-vis the transatlantic slave trade with indigenous cultures in the Americas, the Caribbean, Spain, Africa, and all of this intermingling that is so fundamental to global music and culture,” Green said. “Especially in this part of the world and in Houston, which is a kind of a ground zero for Urbana.”

Tributes for the 20th and 25th anniversaries of Texas music legends DJ Screw and Selena’s tragic passings include DJ sets celebrating their music Nov. 13 and Nov. 19. A screening of “Corpus: A Home Movie for Selena” will take place Nov. 20. A pre-recorded panel discussion with Director Lordes Portillo and feminist scholars will follow the screening. 

This year’s festival includes the inaugural winners of the Borders | No Borders regional film contest. The competition features stories about cultural exchange, cuisine, ancestral and contemporary sacrifices, injustices, art, music, dance, theater and film from Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Mexico. 

“[Borders | No Borders] speaks to the incredible diversity in this region and incredible influences and different gazes. Everybody today talks about different types of gazes and representing new gazes,” Green said. “There’s a lot of different gazes and perspectives in the work that is more indigenous, from outside the US and within the US. There are perspectives that are black, brown and immigrant based, LGBTQIA+ based, and so we are really excited about that.”

Drive-in screenings of headlining films “Mogul Mowgli” and “Ammonite” will take place at the Moonstruck Drive-In Nov. 12 and Nov. 19 respectively. A 40th anniversary remastered screening of “Shogun Assassin” will take place at the Showboat Drive-In Nov. 13. Drive-in screenings are not included in the festival pass but tickets for those screenings are available for purchase on the virtual platform.

“After seeing ‘Mogul Mowgli’ at the Berlin film festival, it was very clear that I wanted to bring it to the Houston Cinema Arts Festival,” Green said. “Then it turned out the director was going to be in Houston at the time of the festival, so he’s going to help introduce the film at the Moonstruck Drive-In on opening night.” 

The opening night screening of “Mogul Mowgli” at Moonstruck Drive-In features Houston native and director Bassam Tariq (“Ghosts of Sugarland”), who will introduce the film and attend the screening. This film will also be available for screening via the virtual platform. After the movie, Houston Cinema Arts Society board member and hip hop legend Bernard ‘Bun B’ Freeman will host a Q&A with Tariq on the virtual platform.

The annual Cinespace film competition, a collaboration between NASA and the Houston Cinema Arts Society, will take place on the virtual platform Nov. 15 at 1 p.m. 

“Cinespace is a competition where we invite filmmakers from around the world to go to the NASA archives or other sources of NASA imagery and find footage that inspires them to make a short film no longer than 10 minutes,” said Dan Jacobs, manager of international partners for Johnson Space Center and director of the Cinespace international short film competition. “The film can contain up to 100% NASA imagery, but it has to be a minimum of 10%. It can be any type of film, any genre. It can be a documentary, narrative, comedy, music video, ambient, whatever they like to tell their own story.”

Because of limitations on filmmakers in creating new imagery and working with actors and other creatives to make films this year, the competition will have a special category for those who exclusively used existing NASA archive imagery to create their film. Additional categories include best documentary and best film celebrating 20 years of humans living on the International Space Station. Houston filmmaker Richard Linklater will award the winners of the Cinespace competition.

“It’s always interesting to see what new people do sometimes with the same imagery. We’ll have some films submitted every year where people have identified and used the exact same clips, but they make a completely different movie and they tell a different story,” Jacobs said. “For that reason, we like to see as many different people and as many new people as possible, because we’re going to get more and more new stories and new ways of telling NASA stories from that. We are always impressed by the quality of work we get and by the number of great filmmakers who are out there. It’s always inspirational to us to see how many people are inspired by NASA.”

Additional programming with a focus on Houston includes “Friday I’m in Love: A Night at Numbers,” a Q&A discussion featuring segments of a documentary about the historic Numbers nightclub with a DJ set to follow, and “The 24th,” a film about the Houston Riot of 1917. 

“The whole festival really is around the world and around the corner. There is so much to participate and interact in, you can get in your car and go to the drive-in and see movies that you literally can’t see any other way,” Green said. “We really do have something for everybody, and we hope they come out, stay home or do whatever they need to participate in some form.” 

A variety of Houston debuts, foreign films, remastered classics and special events make up the upcoming 2020 Houston Cinema Arts Festival. Fans of media and cinema should attend the festival if they’re looking to expand their horizons, support filmmakers and celebrate art.