Typically, film festivals are for people who call it “cinema” instead of “movies,” use fabula and syuzhet instead of story and plot, and turn their long noses up at genre flicks — unless it’s a horror movie where the true monster is depression.
I know because I am them, they are me, and I suspect so is Michael D. Robinson, the lead programmer for this year’s Houston Cinema Arts Festival. He graduated from Rice University with a bachelor’s degree in visual and dramatic arts and anthropology and has been involved with the Houston Cinema Arts Society, or HCAS, for a decade. He didn’t say so during our interview, but I bet he quotes Foucault. Still, don’t let the festival name and Robinson’s pedigree fool you. This festival isn’t just for the city’s cinephiles.
“Houston’s going through shit,” Robinson says. “Houston is always experiencing things, whether that’s climate change, whether that’s the current status of ICE raids in the city. It’s constantly being on the border of Mexico and dealing with border crises that are put upon us by certain leadership. I think that there are all of these preoccupations that the city has that artists and arts programmers need to be responding to.”
The festival isn’t a collection of his personal wish list the programmer assures me. He watched 350 to 400 films for the festival, and only about 10 percent made the cut. Some of his favorites didn’t make it into the festival. It’s his first year at the helm, and he has based his selections on the Houston audience, its demographics and what he thinks will play well here. There are also films he included because of their ties to Houston.
He points to Bassam Tariq. His film Mogul Mowgli opened the festival in 2020, and his new film, Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, will open the festival this year. Tickets are already sold out. Tariq received the TIFF Rising Talent Award at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, but HCAS recognized his talent years ago. “He’s not a rising star for us,” Robinson says. “We don’t have to wait for the world to celebrate the talents that are here.”
This is all well and good, but I had to put the festival to the test. Back in my critic days, when deciding whether to recommend an event or not, I always asked myself, “Would I tell my mom (who, like most Americans, has limited time and a limited budget) to go to this?” Now, my mom is no slouch. She has taste. In the case of film, she’s a fan of the classics: spaghetti westerns and gangster films. But she’s completely unpretentious about movies. In fact, she might cop to seeing a Madea film or two. So, I asked Robinson point-blank: Could I bring my mom to this festival? Without skipping a beat, he not only said yes but added that he would show The Body Is Water, directed and written by Houston filmmaker and HCAS board member Vicky Wight, to his mom.
Wight found a middle ground with the film, Robinson says. The Body Is Water is artistic but accessible. A filmgoer looking for entertainment over profundity would like it just as much as a film enthusiast seeking something insightful. “[It] is able to open up those doorways. I feel like less and less there’s content that I can actually get excited to have a real conversation about, and everything feels siloed. … [She’s] making cinema that feels like a bridge between generations of viewing audiences.”
The Body Is Water is a Houston hometown sneak peek with a world premiere set for October at the Newport Beach Film Festival. Tickets are still available for the film, which is showing on Saturday, October 3, at 4 p.m. in the Brown Auditorium Theater at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. It features the final film role for Isiah Whitlock Jr., who died on December 30, 2025, at the age of 71. Whitlock plays a grieving man who retreats to a small village in West Cork, Ireland, only to be pulled back to community by the tight-knit townspeople. It was shot in Houston and Cork. Wight wrote the film for Whitlock.
Wight worked with Whitlock on her film The Lost Husband, starring Josh Duhamel and Leslie Bibb. Even though he wasn’t in the lead role in this film, Wight recognized Whitlock’s star power immediately. “He was one of the funniest, most amazing people,” Wight says. “He had this great capacity for engaging every single person in a room, and so to me that’s the most attractive quality ever. And we just got on like a house on fire.”
While filming The Lost Husband, the two had dinner every night. “I said to Isiah, while we were sitting there at one of those dinners, ‘What do you want to work on?’ He said, ‘Well, what I really want to work on is where I’m cast as a lead. I’m never cast as a lead. I’m always cast as this crazy, interesting character actor.’ And I said, ‘Well, I’ll write you a movie and you’ll be a lead.'”
A year and a half later, during COVID, Wight called him with the idea for The Body Is Water. Whitlock loved it. They worked together on the film for roughly five years. “As I would rewrite and rewrite and rewrite, he and I would talk about the character,” Wight says. “We spoke about this movie that we were going to make at some point in our lives, and he was going to be the lead. And he still, to that point, had not been a [feature] lead.” In his last film, Whitlock finally realized a dream.
Wight realized a dream at this festival as well. She has two films showing this year. The second, Zina, is a 25-minute documentary about Houston tennis legend Zina Garrison. “It’s a bucket list for me to show these films in Houston,” Wight says.
Zina is moving, visually cohesive and gains more resonance with each viewing. Several tennis greats appear in the short, including Serena Williams, the executive producer; Billie Jean King; and Martina Navratilova. Zina screens with Give Me the Ball!, a full-length documentary about King, on Sunday, October 4, at 7 p.m. in the Brown Auditorium Theater at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
And there are more than 30 additional films screening at the festival that all earned their place. That’s necessary in a post-COVID world, Robinson says. “Just because you build it doesn’t mean they’re going to come. You have to give them a reason why. I want people to know for a fact, if I make that drive, if I have to find parking, pay for parking, God forbid, it’s going to be worth your time.”
The Houston Cinema Arts Festival runs Thursday, October 1, through Sunday, October 11, at venues across Houston, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Rice Cinema; River Oaks Theatre; and the DeLUXE Theater. Tickets, ranging from $15 for a single screening to a $300 all-access pass, are available at cinemahtx.org. Students get 50 percent off, and HCAS members get 25 percent off.
