Houston Cinema Arts Festival

HCAF 2024 will feature a wide variety of curated feature films with a focus on the diverse cultural community of Houston, Texas.

HCAF 2024 will also see the tenth Anniversary of CineSpace, our annual short film competition with NASA, as well as the fifth annual regional short film competition Borders - No Borders.

Our full festival lineup has been announced. Check out the schedule to discover the incredible films, performances, and special guests we have in store!

Schedule of Events:

10:00 AM: Arts Market

The 2024 Houston Cinema Arts Festival is helping connect the arts and local communities with this special pop-up arts market experience full of artists, small vendors, and more.

11:00 AM: Time Passages

In the early stages of the pandemic, filmmaker Kyle Henry finds himself separated from his mother as she succumbs to late-stage dementia in a nursing home. At risk of losing her to COVID-19, he is forced to reckon with the impending loss. Pouring over his extensive family archive to travel back in time and explore the complexities of his feelings towards their relationship, he begins to assemble a scrapbook of memories, digital and Kodachrome, and discovers that beneath the grainy Super-8 home movies and Zoom family singalongs lies a complicated story of motherhood and self-sacrifice. With this warm, vivid expression of love, Kyle Henry comes to terms with his own guilt in an expressive act of mourning – a moving testament to the bonds between mother and child.

Director: Kyle Henry
Runtime: 86 minutes

12:00 pm: Characters Disappearing: Work-in-Progress Screening

The 2024 Houston Cinema Arts Festival work-in-progress selection, this special screening of the unfinished work invites attendees to discuss the film with director/writer/star Connor Sen Warnick and co-star Dylan Breaux and welcomes feedback via cards given to each ticket holder. Moderated by Karen Fang.

1971, New York's Chinatown. A photographer and leader of a radical political activist organization prepares to leave the city as her cousin seeks enlightenment in the teachings of a 250-year-old monk and her lover begins to question his life's pursuits. A shadowplay tracing the outlines of the past and pulling from his own family history and personal encounters with anti-Asian violence, Connor Sen Warnick's debut feature is an evocative haunting of the present.

Director: Connor Sen Warnick

2:30 pm: Jimmy

This program is supported by Humanities Texas, the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this exhibition, do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities or Humanities Texas.At the age of 24, James Baldwin left New York and relocated to Paris. As an expatriate, he would spend much of the next decade writing his early books in the Café de Flore and immersing himself in the artistic community of the Left Bank. The impressionistic first feature from photographer and filmmaker Yashaddai Owens, JIMMY reimagines a young James Baldwin as a flâneur guided by his desires, led to discover the city through his senses. Set to a series of discordant jazz inflections by Paco Andreo, this edifying work of self-liberation, abstract and inventive in its approach, avoids dry facts for something thrillingly alive with youth, wonder, and discovery.

Director: Yashaddai Owens
Runtime: 67 minutes

4:30 pm: Panel Conversation: From Research to Screenplay

Filmmakers Connor Sen Warnick (CHARACTERS DISAPPEARING) and Yashaddai Owens (JIMMY) join us in a conversation to discuss the process of transposing hard facts to poetry. From the little-known radical histories of 1970s Chinatown to a reimagined portrait of a young James Baldwin in Paris, these small-budgeted, 16mm features navigate the often difficult journey of compiling multiple stories and sources into a consistent and compelling narrative, unearthing the beauty of reality along the way.

5:30 pm: Bird

Writer-director Andrea Arnold returns to the gritty social realism of FISH TANK and the Oscar-winning WASP, but as always, the British auteur subverts our expectations - here taking flight with a fantastical tale of transformation. Twelve-year-old Bailey (newcomer Nykiya Adams) lives with her single father Bug (a tattooed Barry Keoghan) and brother Hunter (Jason Buda) in a squat in North Kent. Bug struggles to find time for his children, leading Bailey to seek adventure elsewhere. Leaving the graffiti-covered walls of the squat where her family resides, she meets Bird (Franz Rogowski), an eccentric dreamer who dares her to spread her wings. A striking coming-of-age tale that hides its magic in plain sight.

Director: Andrea Arnold
Runtime: 119 minutes

6:00 pm: ME and It's Such a Beautiful Day

Charming and deadpan, the minimalist animation of Texas-based Academy Award-nominated director Don Hertzfeldt contemplates existence - and all its implications - through refined storytelling, earning fans and plaudits the world over. Deceptive in their simplicity, it is a testament to the depth of Hertzfeldt's talents that he is able to imbue such beauty and humanity into stick figures. The Houston Cinema Arts Festival is proud to present "one of the best animated films of all time" and Hertzfeldt's sole feature to date, IT'S SUCH A BEAUTIFUL DAY, screening alongside his new 22-minute short ME.