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:

12:00 pm: Colors, Nailed to the Mast: New Experimental Cinema

A Black Screen Too

A sequel to her earlier Black Rectangle, and reminiscent of Evelyn Lambart and Norman McLaren's groundbreaking animations, Rhayne Vermette's buzzing miniature A Black Screen Too is a burst of colour and movement undercut by darkness.

Director: Rhayne Vermette
Runtime: 2 minutes

Careless Passage

"Now that I'm in motion again, I look forward to the passage from this life to future wanderings in unknown places. My film alludes to and appreciates the encounters that flow without ceasing as we move through our personal version of reality" (Jerome Hiler).

Director: Jerome Hiler
Runtime: 20 minutes

b/w

This film uses close focus cinematography of text from commercial house paint samples to suggest a mythology of light and shadow. The audience is asked to participate during the screening by reading the paint names aloud. - Anthology Film Archives

Director: Christopher Harris
Runtime: 3 minutes

Farsi seme

"Farsi seme is silent. Silent like the plants that surround us. Silent like the seeds that I began to collect in places where I would go for a walk. Collecting blood, collecting seeds. The power of seeds represented the intersection of solidarity and singularity: it wasn't only a no-longer-being-a-flower. There was a multiplicity of forms, a lushness, the intricate delicacy of their forms… I thought of translating venous and menstrual bloods into two different natural pigments, hematite and rubia tinctorum". (Anna Marziano)

Director: Anna Marziano
Runtime: 10 minutes

Sinking Feeling

In Zachary Epcar's Sinking Feeling, human bodies and voices are counterposed with the shimmering abstractions, ambient fizzle, and rigid linearity of corporate architecture. A disquieting glimpse into a post-post-modernity of dread and torpor, Sinking Feeling peels back the surfaces of these Ballardian non-places to release pent-up fluids, a stifled longing, a hidden radiance.

Director: Zachary Epcar
Runtime: 21 minutes

A Sense of Nothing

A film motivated by nothing (but daily life and (my) vision). It represents nothing, it signifies nothing. There's no hidden meaning, no defined subject, no predetermined objective. Inside and outside. Just angles, textures and flashes of color. A whole different empire of vision, impossible to be put into words. "Nothing" as anything outside common visual knowledge, anything that defies the logic of naming the world; a possibility for a new way of thinking; of dealing with our visual world.

Director: Francisco Rojas
Runtime: 4 minutes

Our Cave

Magritte doubted Plato's allegory of the cave through his painting The Human Condition(1935). In the 18th century Joseon Dynasty, Shin Don Bok put together the anecdote collection Hak San Han Eon, which includes a story of two people willingly venturing deep into a cave rather than seeking light outside, eventually reaching a completely different world. In this film, the two people become women, and together, they load the film into the camera. In the utter darkness where only the sound of water is heard, images emerge. In that place where everything is inverse, the camera becomes a watering can, a mirror, and a teapot.

Director: Heehyun Choi
Runtime: 22 minutes

1:00 pm: Bambi (35mm) accompanied by Book Signing for "Background Artist: The Life and Work of Tyrus Wong"

In Background Artist: The Life and Work of Tyrus Wong, film scholar and cultural critic Karen Fang illuminates the life of a hidden figure of the twentieth-century whose prolific contributions span popular culture - from Disney to Hallmark to Warner Bros - and shape the American imagination. A journey from an offshore detention center to the worlds of art and Hollywood - where Wong's work informed REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, THE WILD BUNCH, and belatedly, BAMBI. Background Artist is a stirring testament to the transformative power of art and creation as vivid as the enchanting images of the unsung hero. A pinnacle of Disney magic, BAMBI features Tyrus Wong's stunning art direction, rich with expressionistic bursts of color and light, which elevate the tale of the lonely white-tailed fawn from mere children's entertainment to high art.

Director: David Hand
Runtime: 70 minutes

5:00 pm: CineSpace and Closing Night Party

Join us for the 10th Anniversary of CineSpace!

The festival concludes with the 10th annual CineSpace short film competition, presented in collaboration with NASA. This unique competition invites international filmmakers to create films using imagery and footage from NASA's archives. Winners will be announced and awarded a cash prize during the festival's closing night party at The Orange Show Center for Visionary Art on November 17th. Writer and Director Richard Linklater, known for HITMAN and BOYHOOD, selects the winning films alongside a team of specialists from the Houston Cinema Arts Society and NASA.

Doors open at 5:00pm for the CineSpace Festival including interactive exhibits, games, space-themed art, food trucks, beverages, and music.

Film Screening begins at 8:00pm.