Editor

The 38th Annual WorldFest-Houston International Film Festival continues its fully dedicated Independent Film screening format for the upcoming April 22 - May 1, 2005 unspooling. WorldFest will screen 49 feature film premieres, with an exclusive emphasis on American and International Independent feature films and with a continuing annual spotlight on 100 award-winning short films and documentary films.

50 New Indie Features and 104 Award-Winning Shorts!
WorldFest Artistic and Program Director, Kathleen Haney, stated, "We are continuing our focus on a quality selection of truly independent films. This year our films are selected from over 4,500 submissions and represent 24 different countries. But the festival also includes two films made in Houston: the documentary 'Resurrection: The J. R. Richard Story' by local filmmaker Greg Carter, and the Gala Opening Night World Premiere of 'Dancing in Twilight', a drama written by Houstonian Rishi Vij and filmed in Houston." Haney continued, "As always, we are looking for 'A good story, well told' as our time-tested approach to film selection. We have special sidebars of Foreign, Children's and Family Film Sections. All of our films are totally Indie productions, and each film is well represented by its filmmakers, who attend to introduce their films!" The films are screened at the AMC Meyer Park Theatre, sponsoring host of the 2005 WorldFest.
WorldFest is the film festival that honored Stephen Spielberg, The Coen Brothers, George Lucas, Ang Lee, Spike Lee, Oliver Stone, and David Lynch with their very first awards. No other festival has such a "discovery" track record. Today WorldFest continues to showcase the true independent film, offering a fiercely dedicated special venue for directors searching for an independent forum for their works. WorldFest is still a place where Houston audiences can discover exciting new directors before they are "discovered" by Hollywood, unlike most other film festivals, where most of the so- called 'Independent Films' featured are actually high budget films produced by one of the major studios' special "Indie" divisions. In fact, most of the films featured at Sundance already have their distribution deals well in place before the festival.

Click here for the complete screening schedule!
The 108-page WorldFest program book is distributed to every major film festival in the world and to every known major distributor in the world. This detailed film catalogue has become an invaluable reference document for film acquisition and review. WorldFest has emerged as the oldest continuous film festival management in the world, with the same director for 38 consecutive years. A few other festivals are older, but they have had as many as ten different directors. WorldFest traces its beginnings to August 1961, when it began screening foreign & art films as Cinema Arts, an international film society. It became a competitive international film festival seven years later, in April 1968, and has been in continuous operation since. It is one of the original three film festivals in North America, with San Francisco and New York as the first two events. Now there are over 600 USA film festivals of various levels and quality, most being non-competitive screening events. WorldFest will again include its annual Short Film Showcase, a special review of 100 new short and student films. To honor Norway's centennial year in 2005, WorldFest-Houston joins the Royal Norwegian Consulate General in presenting a Commemorative Sidebar of Norwegian films. There will be four Norwegian feature films and seven short subjects. WorldFest also presents an annual "Program Francophone", which this year includes six feature films and three shorts. The 38th Annual WorldFest also offers international competition in TV production, TV commercials, unproduced Screenplays & Teleplays, Experimental, Student, Documentary, Business & Industry, New Media and Music Videos. WorldFest is the largest film & video competition in the world, with more than 4,500 category entries received in 2005. There are almost 200 sub-categories for competition, allowing each film to compete in its own genre. The Festival screens DVD video via Christie Digital DLP Projection and Wagner Media, major sponsors of the festival, in addition to 35mm film.