2019 Houston Cinema Arts Festival

The Houston Cinema Arts Festival is a five-day, multi-venue festival that includes a multitude of narrative and documentary films, live multimedia performances, panel discussions, Meet the Makers workshops, and free outdoor and student field trip screenings. In its relatively short history, HCAS has brought notable guest artists, such as Tilda Swinton, Alex Gibney, Guillermo Arriaga, Isabella Rossellini, John Turturro, Shirley MacLaine, Rick Linklater, Ethan Hawke, Fisher Stevens, Robert Redford, Tracy Letts, James Ivory, Julie Taymor, Will Forte, and Thomas Haden Church among many others, to the festival. For more information and to purchase tickets, please visit www.cinemahtx.org.

Trey Edward Shults, one of Hollywood’s hottest rising stars and a native Houstonian, will open HCAF19 at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston on Thursday, November 14 with a screening of his festival darling Waves. Shults will then conduct a post-screening discussion with Houston Cinema Arts Society board member, hip-hop icon, and Rice lecturer Bun B. The evening will be capped off with a lively afterparty — also at the museum — featuring DJ Flash Gordon Parks.

Other notable HCAF19 highlights include:

• The Texas premiere of a new restoration of Euzhan Palcy’s seminal 1983 award-winning masterwork Sugar Cane Alley at MFAH on Saturday, November 16 with the director in attendance.
• The cult 1972 documentary Black Rodeo rides into the Houston Cinema Arts Festival with Director Jeff Kanew, internet archivist and “Yeehaw Agenda” term coiner Bri Malandro, and African-American Rodeo riders on Sunday, November 17.
• CineSpace returns for its fifth year with award-winning NASA-inspired short films selected out of hundreds of submissions from across the globe.
• The Texas premiere of The Science of Fictions (Rice Cinema), the Houston premiere of Portrait of a Lady on Fire (MFAH), and the Houston premiere of Always in Season with dir. Jacqueline Olive in person (The DeLuxe Theater)
• HCAF19’s three Closing Night Films on Monday, November 18.