Houston Cinema Arts Festival Stands Up For Movies and Togetherness — Why It’s More Important Than Ever In 2025

There’s something almost deliciously defiant about sitting in a dark theater, enveloped in a movie these days. Letting a film wash over you instead of doom scrolling. Surrendering to someone else’s imagination instead of the algorithm’s incessant feed. In an often fractured America of flickering screens and half attention spans, the simple act of watching a movie — together with other people no less — can almost begin to feel like a tiny civic disobedience. Houston Cinema Arts Festival is betting on that. Or, to put it in cinematic terms: HCAF 2025 arrives as the gentle but firm hand tilting chins back toward the theater’s flickering sanctuary

The theme of Houston Cinema Arts Fest this year is HERE, an idea that that sounds simple until you try to practice it for more than three minutes in a world designed to distract you.

“We wanted a theme that reminded artists and community leaders to stay present,” Cinema Arts Fest executive director Katie Creeggan-Ríos says. “Not just reactionary. And to remain thoughtful, strategic and grounded.”

This year, the festival doesn’t ease into its premise. This film fest is fully formed, confident in its scope and unapologetic in its ambition. From this Thursday, November 6 through November 16, the 17th annual Houston Cinema Arts Festival will unfurl across the city like a film reel running at full speed. More than 50 movies, a dozen workshops, live music showcases, short-film programs, a photography exhibition and an arts market are all on tap.

Screenings and happenings will anchor themselves in Houston’s cultural cathedrals and creative chapels. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Menil Collection; River Oaks Theatre; the DeLUXE Theater in Fifth Ward; Aurora Picture Show’s newly minted Second Ward home; the gleaming Susan and Fayez Sarofim Hall at Rice University; and scrappier temples of culture Wonky Power, Echoes and Café Brasil will all host events. Add a price tag that swings from free and pay-what-you-can to a modest $10 to $20 for special movie screenings, with all-access passes starting at around $50, and you have a movie festival that feels less like velvet-rope cultural gatekeeping and more like an open invitation.

No, really, get in here. You belong.

Houston’s Movie Festival

Across its more than a dozen venues, Houston Cinema Arts Festival is leaning into Houston as not just a backdrop, but as collaborator. From Café Brasil’s opening-night gathering — where cinema is set to met photography, music and conversation — to performances in the East End and installations in The Heights, this movie fest will make art a lived and situated experience.

This spread-out festival seems appropriate in a city of porous borders and constant motion, where stories are rarely linear and identities are often layered.

“We have stories that are being told here in Houston that aren’t being told anywhere else in the world.” Creeggan-Rios tells PaperCity.

Highlighting Regional Filmmakers

HCAF’s Borders | No Borders program highlights emerging Southern and border-region filmmakers. CineSpace, a NASA-supported competition, received more than 200 submissions from more than 50 countries.

This movie festival does not just show movies, it nurtures filmmakers who might not otherwise get a voice.

This is not accidental. Creeggan-Rios speaks often about her time as a young Houston artist when she was told she needed to leave the city to succeed. That narrative — common in American arts ecosystems — is one she’s actively fighting against.

“My goal is to make it possible for young Texans to stay here, tell their stories here and build careers here,” Creeggan-Rios says.

From the perspective of SWAMP executive director and filmmaker advocate Randee Ramsey, Houston has been fertile ground for nurturing the next generation of movie makers.

“What makes Houston great is diversity. That is our big superpower.” Ramsey says. “Across the arts in Houston, if we build a creative community that is the engine of a creative economy, we can change the face of the city.”

The Houston film community leans into the kind of local specificity and global resonance that the Bayou City offers: multilingual, multi-tradition, multi-imaginative. Cinema here is not an export. It’s an inheritance in some ways.

When experimental film becomes part of the cinematic language, Houston’s Aurora Picture Show offers a vital contour.

“There’s something subversive about experimental work,” Aurora Picture Show executive director Sarah Stauder says. “It can communicate very subtle images at a time when it feels dangerous to put words out there. We want to be a safe space for unsafe work.”

For Stauder, the festival is the cornerstone of Houston’s cultural landscape and a springboard for fresh ideas. Among the several movies that capture her imagination this year are director Michael Sicinski’s experimental shorts at the new Rice Cinema and Michael Robinson curating the Borders | No Borders narrative shorts.

“The festival is an important showcase of film’s role in Houston, but for us it’s part of a year-round practice of placing work in meaningful dialogue with this city,” Stauder notes. “Our HCAF program — Texas perspective intertwining with an Ethiopian video art festival — again reflects Houston’s layered, blended sense of place.”

Community Events

Houston Cinema Arts Festival doesn’t just show movies. It invites risk, discomfort, thought. It says you don’t always need a hero arc. Sometimes you need a frame that lingers. A sound piece that reverberates. A community screening that opens into a conversation.

Workshops and live events are folded into the festival schedule with purpose — and those dates and venues matter. On opening night at Aurora, a new work from an Austin-based filmmaker (commissioned by Aurora) will screen alongside a large-scale projection mapped onto urban surfaces. This Saturday, November 8, a sun-up sound-recording session titled “Here, Here,” from local composer Scott Szabo, will gather participants at a neighborhood studio before shifting to an outdoor field recording.

This Sunday, November 9, scratch-film ateliers and celluloid veteran Steven Woloshen invite both writers and visual artists into the filmmaking fold. Meanwhile, narrative-shorts blocks at Rice Cinema (November 11) and the Borders | No Borders competition at MFAH (November 12) position Houston talent beside work from across Texas and beyond.

Community screenings matter as much as premieres. At the Deluxe Theater in the Fifth Ward (November 13), a restored print of Cabin in the Sky will screen with commentary from film historian Ralph Nickerson, contextualizing the legacies of Black independent cinema in the South. On November 14, the festival returns to the River Oaks Theatre for a 35mm block of global premieres, celebrating Houston’s reclamation of that historic cinema space.

All of this points to a larger ethos. Presence matters, not as passive attendance, but as active engagement.

“In a country that currently has an epidemic of loneliness, coming together and hearing stories and having universal experiences is itself its own medicine,” Ramsey says.

And that gathering, that communal inhalation and exhalation of light and shadow, is central to the festival’s value. Conventional movies will come and go, but at this festival the edges blur between film, installation, performance, workshop and conversation.

So much of contemporary film culture has migrated inward — onto personal screens, into private algorithms. HCAF is pushing back, emphasizing shared presence as both an aesthetic and civic must.

“I want people to say, “I experienced this film with hundreds of others,” Ramsey says. “Let that be a touchstone for relationships — with friends they brought and people they met in the lobby. Shared experience can spark conversation, collaboration and community. That’s what we desperately need.”

On the top of Ramsey’s list of move picks for this year’s Houston Cinema Arts Festival  is Room Temperature, a surreal film about a California family transforming their home into a haunted house.

If this year’s Houston Cinema Arts Festival has a theme, it may be that storytelling shapes reality. And choosing how we show up in our present determines the future we will inhabit.

“I hope people walk away feeling empowered to tell their own story. Or maybe understand something new about the world that they didn’t see before,” Creegan-Rios says.

There is a humility to that remark, and a challenge. Art cannot resolve an uncertain world, but it can make space for witnessing — and remind people that clarity often begins with proximity and presence, not distance. And in a city as expansive, complicated and luminous as Houston, that feels not only timely but essential.

For the Houston Cinema Arts Festival’s full lineup and more information, go here.