Welcome back to the thrilling conclusion of my Denton Black Film Festival 2026 coverage!
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Film Festival
Welcome to the first part of my coverage of the Denton Black Film Festival, 2026 Edition. The fest was held January 28 through February 1, and extended virtually from the first through February eighth.
I’m kicking off my 2026 film festival coverage with a trip to my old college stomping grounds. Denton, Texas, home of my alma mater, the University of North Texas, is host to the Denton Black Film Festival, the largest fest in Texas that focuses solely on Black-created films and performing arts.
The theme of this year’s fest, True Texas Tales, delivered to the audience, among other things, Depression-era bank robbers, an East Texas murder scandal, an inspiring account of Black excellence in the Jim Crow South, and a (highly whitewashed) look at the state’s most iconic location and historical event.
The mastermind behind the It Came From Texas Film Festival, Dallas-area media relations and publicity veteran Kelly Kitchens, has returned with a six-shooter on her hip and astride her prized pony to deliver the third annual iteration of her celebration of movies made wholly or primarily in the Lone Star State.
If you’re sleeping on the Oak Cliff Flim Festival (OCFF), I’m here to let you know that you’re missing out on one of the country’s most authentic, scrappy, and original celebrations of the moving image. Each of the handful of times I’ve attended the fest – including once as a volunteer over a decade ago, and twice now covering it for this site – I’ve been delighted by its punk-rock aesthetic and complete and total immersion in film culture. The programmers and staff at OCFF schedule quirky, thought-provoking titles that rarely disappoint.
OCFF 2025’s theme, Real Movies for Real Movie People, stresses the idea of human emotion and connection through movies. The fest’s website landing page features a graphic that includes the phrases “Human Cinema, Filling Heads, Connecting Souls, Sparking Feelings.”
Based on my personal belief that the absolute best antidote to small people with small minds – a constituency that only seems to grow by the day here in the good ole US of A – is as much exposure to different cultures, perspectives, ideas, and art as possible.
So, if anything can get me out of my funk, it’s a film festival.
A depressed writer, a group of angry librarians, nuclear waste, and a pioneering comedian all played a part in my cinematic adventures at DIFF 2025, along with a few detours to connect with friends and loved ones, as well as to join in solidarity, for a few hours at least, to others like me who are desperate to stem the tide of the spreading fascism in our country.
On my way to Cinépolis for my first screening of DIFF 2025, I heard a ping from my phone. As I drove, my car’s robot voice delivered the incoming message from a North Texas Film Critics Association colleague. He was letting the NTFCA Discord channel know that he saw one of the DIFF opening films, called Omaha, at Sundance, and that it was his favorite film of that fest. I was, in fact, on my way to see that very movie.
My film festival coverage for 2025 is in full swing with the upcoming Dallas International Film Festival (DIFF). This is an exciting year for DIFF for one particular reason. For the first time in its nineteen-year history, DIFF is now an Oscar-qualifying festival following an announcement last October from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). The Dallas International Film Festival is now one of 181 festivals worldwide – 59 in the US – that has been approved by the AMPAS as a qualifying festival. According to the DIFF 2025 website, “[F]ilms that win qualified awards between October 1, 2024, and September 30, 2025, may be qualified to enter the 98th Academy Awards®, provided that the films meet all the requirements set forth in the official rules for that season.”
Two weeks ago, I signed off at the end of my SXSW 2025 post-mortem by looking ahead to the upcoming Dallas International Film Festival. Please allow me to now pull a Tarantino and go back to the week before SXSW started. In the crush of activity over the four days between what I’m about to describe and the first day of South By – it was a flurry of laundry, the day job (because I’m only given so much PTO in a given year!), and preparing for my trip down to Austin – I barely had time to recover from another film festival (let alone getting anything written about it) before I was out the door again.
But I need to go back even further.
Standing near the entrance of the South Lamar Alamo Drafthouse, waiting to get into my next screening, I noticed something odd. On the street right in front of the theater, where a lone curb forms to separate cars from pedestrians and street from sidewalk, a large, black SUV swiftly pulled up and a flurry of activity followed. The SUV stopped about thirty feet from where I was standing; there was a direct line from the vehicle to the theater doors.
I branched out a little this year at SXSW by attending my first of the many discussion sessions available during the fest, which are held in the Austin Convention Center ballrooms. It wasn’t a movie, but the conversation was certainly movie related, as it was an interview with actor Kyle MacLachlan, hosted by Jenni Kaye, who is a contributor to Letterboxd.
There’s something familiar yet exciting about showing up in the morning waiting for a new day of screenings to start at a film festival. I got to the Lamar Street Alamo a little early on day two of SXSW 2025. The volunteers of the fest have been instructed to start handing out queue cards for each movie an hour before each screening starts. I arrived with about 90 minutes to spare before my chosen first screening for the day, The Spies Among Us, was to begin.
As soon as I dialed into one of the many conversations that was happening around me in theater three of the Lamar Street Alamo Drafthouse, I knew I was in the right place. Waiting for my first screening of South By 2025 to start, I heard one festival goer ask a few others what brought them to the fest. They responded that one of their children was celebrating his impending college graduation. The family celebrated graduations by gathering for an event of the graduate’s choice. This child studied film in college, so his pick was for the family to attend the festival together.
Next week, for the third straight year, I’m heading down to Austin, TX to cover the Lone Star State’s biggest multi-hyphenate festival and conference, South by Southwest. I’ll be honest, I really wasn’t expecting to get in this year, but I was pleasantly surprised a few weeks ago when I received confirmation that I had been approved for press credentials. In 2023, I was gifted a pass by a friend. In 2024, I was sponsored by, and primarily wrote for, a website with a bigger reach than mine in order to cover the fest. This year, I applied on my own, thinking there was no way my little 2800-visitor-a-month website would secure me a press pass.
The theme of this year’s It Came from Texas film festival was a celebration of the independent Texas spirit. Festival director Kelly Kitchens infused that theme not only into the movies she chose to screen, but into every aspect of the fest to create a wider celebration of Texas artists and their impact on the history and legacy of film.
The theme of Oak Cliff Film Festival (OCFF) 2024 – movies are all around us – fit with my experience of the fest. The opening night celebration launched with an endearing short film, shot by the OCFF crew, in which an escaped Wes Anderson character extols the virtues of seeing movies everywhere we look. (Full disclosure: Chris Gardner, the actor who portrays the quirky “filmthropoligist” in the short, is my across-the-street neighbor and runs PR for the fest.)
During the short, Dr. Ovie McClintock makes the classic director’s frame by putting his two thumbs and forefingers together to form a widescreen rectangle. In his world, inanimate objects on the street around the Texas Theatre create the "wild, undomesticated, feral cinema" all around us. He drolly asks a parking meter about its motivation, encourages a few newspaper vending machines on their outstanding performances, and tells us that even the giant cow sitting atop the local Charco Broiler Steak House is in on the magic. “That’s not a cow,” McClintock breathlessly intones, “that’s a character!”