WorldFest is ready to kick into high gear! 

The 56th Annual WorldFest-Houston International Film Festival (April 25-30, 2023) will announce its 2023 film line-up on April 5th on their website at www.worldfest.org  Now celebrating ten years of amazing work by the creative team at López Negrete Communications, the premier Hispanic Ad Agency, WorldFest is delighted to announce that López Negrete was awarded a Best-in-Show ADDY for their work for the 2022 WorldFest campaign! Kudos to López Negrete for their well-deserved Award!

All screenings will be held at Cinemark Memorial City in SW Houston. Please check beginning on April 5^th www.worldfest.org for trailers, times and ticketing.

WorldFest opens this year with Festival Resident Artist and longtime Alum, Director Shawn Welling with his new film, Mission from Outer Space. The film includes a very special star of the Silver Screen and Television, none other than Lee Majors (The Six Million Dollar Man), who will be on hand opening night to help WorldFest really kick things off on the red carpet as The Bayou City Band plays popular show tunes! Way Out from China is our second Opening film starting at 7:30PM with Director Sophia Han & her lead Actress, Lin Zhao, planning to attend.

WorldFest’s 56^th edition is a delicious cornucopia for true cineastes offering 8 World Premieres from 36 selected features; among them, 7 female directors hailing from such far flung places as Denmark, Nigeria and China. The annual Italian Panorama is slimmed down to a few shorts and two features (Italo Disco & Cinque Stanze) so we shall still say, “Allora prendi i popcorn e spegni le luci!”

WorldFest offers a great array of other foreign films such as Black Moon, Mexico, Clear Shadows, Portugal; The Great Man, India; Miró, Spain; The Namessime, France/Switzerland; Let the Party Begin, Israel; Black Stone, Greece; September Babies, Switzerland; She’s From Another Planet, S. Korea; Strangers, Nigeria; A Time for Summer, Poland;The Whirlpool, Slovenia as well as Snow White Dies at the End, Macedonia.

A very special film included in this year’s Documentary line-up is “Finding Purpose: The Brookwood Story” with ex-Houstonian Director Ariel Levy here to personally present an eye-opening video journey on the challenges that the Adult Disability Community is overcoming and the remarkable gifts that this unique and amazing group of humans has to give.  A really rare occasion is to celebrate Christmas in April and you can do so by coming to see the return of acclaimed director David Winning, a long-time festival favorite, who is bringing his 25^th Hallmark film for a Special Courtesy Screening of Blake Shelton’s Executive Producing of Time for Him to Come Home for Christmas.

 Closing out this year’s line-up will be the World Premiere of When Houston Had the Blues which poignantly and musically depicts how Houston’s legacy of mega-talented Blues musicians struggled to make their way in the industry. Many directors will attend this year’s premieres at WorldFest and conduct “Question & Answer” sessions right after their screenings. Come on down and ask them just how they got the dog to kneel & bark on cue.

WorldFest Artistic and Program Director, Kathleen Haney, stated, “We are thrilled and delighted to present such an exceptional line-up of independently produced films!

Each year, we are amazed by what filmmakers create in spite of incumbent challenges. The caliber of Indie films just keeps getting better and better.”  Haney continued “Our work is so gratifying to witness the cycles of growth in filmmakers who begin with a script, progress to a short then culminate with a feature-length film coming on back to WorldFest through the years. We love to shine a light on their creative persistence and excellence.”

WorldFest will continue with its annual Short Film Showcase, a special review of 64 brand new shorts. This is the festival that gave top honors at the start of their careers to Spielberg, Lucas, The Coen Brothers, Ridley Scott, Robert Rodriguez, Randal Kleiser, Spike Lee, Agnieszka Holland, Ang Lee, Leslie Linka Glatter, John Lee Hancock, Oliver Stone, and David Lynch, among many others! Few other festivals have such a “discovery” track record. WorldFest is the third oldest film festival in North America and the oldest in the South.

WorldFest began in August 1961, as Cinema Arts, an International Film Society. It began screening independent, foreign & art films. It became an officially 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. Following WorldFest was Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, and Seattle. Now with more than 1,000 USA film festivals of various types, levels & quality, most  being simply non-competitive screening events! WorldFest is International, competitive and invites filmmakers worldwide.

The 56^th annual WorldFest offers International Competition in; Features, Shorts, 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, in sheer number of actual category entries, with more than 4,100 category entries received in 2023. There are over 200 sub-categories for competition, allowing each film to compete in its own individual genre.

WorldFest-Houston is sponsored by Boxer Properties, the State of Texas, City of Houston, Space Center Houston, CINEMARK Theatres, Houston Yacht Club, The Hotel Marriott Westin at Memorial City, Memorial City Mall, Masterpiece Inl., López Negrete Communications, Action Limo, UOFF and Houston Arts Alliance (HAA).   www.worldfest.org