Houston’s Movie Festival Grows Up Into Something That Treasures the Bayou City’s Stories and History — Cinema Arts Rings True

There comes a moment in the life of a city when it stops asking permission to be seen as a place where cinema matters. Cannes has the Mediterranean light. Venice has the Lido. Toronto has its autumn crowds spilling from theaters onto King Street, still arguing about the films they have just seen.

Houston’s own movie festival isn’t nearly at any of those levels. But Bayou City movie lovers arrive at this year’s Houston Cinema Arts Festival fresh off an extraordinary mission to save the historic Garden Oaks Theater from the wrecking ball — a grassroots campaign that’s drawn more than 800 donors and the voices of visionary Houston directors Wes Anderson and Richard Linklater. What might have become another story about Houston losing a beautiful piece of itself instead became something rarer: a collective effort to fight for a place where movies are treasured.

Houston is beginning to look less like a city that occasionally produces great filmmakers and more like a film city — with its own cinematic language, constellation of theaters and artists, and growing confidence to place itself in conversation with the great film cities of the world. Its mythology is already here: the silver geometry of the Astrodome, the rescued glow of the River Oaks Theatre, the DeLUXE in Fifth Ward.

For 11 days in October, the Houston Cinema Arts Festival makes its own case. Among the the movies generating conversation this year are Bassam Tariq’s Houston-rooted Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother; Patrick Wang’s visually audacious A. Rimbaud; the timely Possible Love; William Greaves’ extraordinary time capsule Once Upon a Time in Harlem; and The Brittney Griner Story.

Together, they suggest the breadth of a movie festival slowly growing in stature. Intimate and international, historical and experimental, deeply Houston and insistently outward-looking.

“Houston is also a major city,” New lead HCAF programmer Michael D. Robinson says. “We’re part of that same fabric. Our film-going crowd deserves the best of world cinema.”

Houston’s Film Festival Tells Houston Stories

The 18th Houston Cinema Arts Festival, which runs through next Sunday, October 11, expands from the 25 movies it showed last year to 35 this year, playing in the River Oaks Theatre, DeLUXE Theater, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Rice Cinema, Aurora Picture Show and Brasil. Its reach is international, and the center of gravity is unmistakably Houston.

To Robinson, it’s all about “Reflecting Houston to the world and the world back into Houston.”

But Robinson wants Houstonians to recognize the cinematic history already beneath their feet too. Robert Altman’s Brewster McCloud was filmed inside the Dome. Brittney Griner is a Houston story (and now a new Houston Comet too). So is DJ Screw.

“You’re connecting the stories of these films to the story of your city,” Robinson notes.

Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, written and created by Houston-raised filmmaker Bassam Tariq, draws its story from the city that shaped him, transforming Houston from a mere backdrop into a character of its own. The thriller stars Mahershala Ali, John Cho and Giancarlo Esposito. Tariq returned home for a post movie Q&A.

Houston emerges not through landmarks in Your Mother, but through quieter details of recognition — apartment complexes, industrial edges, highways washed in early morning light, trucks idling outside warehouses, the distant call of a train.

“It is so rare to get to experience that in a theater with other people and share the topography of your own city,” Robinson says.

For Randee Ramsey, executive director of the Southwest Alternate Media Project (SWAMP), the feeling is almost visceral.

“I feel a sense of home I haven’t felt the last few years,” Ramsey says. “This feels like Houston, and I love it.”

The festival’s theme, “My Eyes Are Playing Tricks on Me,” arrives at an uncanny moment. AI can manufacture faces, voices and events that never occurred. Seeing is no longer necessarily believing.

“How do we regain our agency over our images?” Ramsey asks.

That idea — agency — travels quietly through the festival. Agency over an image or a city’s history. And, unexpectedly, over grief.

Houston filmmaker Vicky Wight’s The Body Is Water reaches into that territory, drawing partly from her own confrontation with serious illness and loss.

“When I think about grief, I think of it like a cave because it feels hopeless and dark and heavy,” Wight tells PaperCity.

Her movie considers what happens when other people enter that darkness with us. “Life keeps finding him and drawing him back into the world, out of the cave,” Wight says.

Movies are particularly suited to such ghosts. The dead walk again. Buildings return. Neighborhoods erased by development flicker back into existence.

That makes the return of James Blue’s landmark 1978 documentary Who Killed Fourth Ward? especially resonant, alongside Greaves’ Once Upon a Time in Harlem.

Robinson finds the essential question in such films: “How do you understand legacy?

“We’re growing that creative economy one brick at a time,” he says.

Her message to Houston filmmakers, crews and investors is uncomplicated: “Stay local. We’re here. You don’t have to go to L.A. You don’t have to go to Atlanta. There is enormous talent in your backyard.”

Perhaps that is the most interesting trick of the eye at this year’s Cinema Arts Festival.

Houston film lovers are currently fighting to save a 1947 movie palace from disappearance, choosing instead to let its screen glow again after spending years as a church. New films are capturing Houston’s elusive geography. Its highways, its hidden corners and the strange topography of what it’s like to live here.

“I’m astounded all the time by the creativity of love — by the ways people construct community and repair us over and over and over again,” Wight says.

Cannes will always have its blue sweep of the Mediterranean Sea. Houston has something else. A city still inventing itself, coming into its own, hoping to become a true cinema city.

For the full Houston Cinema Arts Festival schedule and ticket info, go here.