LOCAL Houston | The City Guide NOVEMBER 2015 | Page 46
CineSpace Day at the MFAH:
Friday, November 13 | www.cinespace15.org
Apollo 13
TIME’s A Year in Space
CHANNELING YOUR INNER NASA
CineSpace
Since 2009 the Houston Cinema Arts Society (HCAS) has hosted the Houston
Cinema Arts Festival. For Houstonians, the festival gives us the opportunity to enjoy
one of the things Houston does best…celebrate the arts and have a grand ol’ time
while doing it. One of the other things Houston does best, that we sometimes forget, is being home to one of our biggest attractions, NASA. I’m a little embarrassed to admit that in my 20+ years of living here, I’ve never actually been to
NASA. I have friends that work there and whenever anyone visits me from, well,
CineSpace
anywhere, it's the #1 thing they want to see. Given that this amazing resource sits
right in our own back yard, it makes sense that working with Dan Jacobs, Manager for International HCAS Board Member Patrick Kwiatkowski on how to best incorporate NASA’s goldmine of imagery
Partners for the International Space Station Program, into a competition for this year’s festival. Together, Patrick (with over 15 years of short film festival expecollaborative brainchild CineSpace (www.cinespace15.org) rience) and Dan (along with his dedicated team at NASA) conceived the birth of CineSpace, to help
would be born.
kick start utilizing NASA’s footage and add the festival’s very first competitive element by allowing filmmakers from all over the world to submit their short films for judging, as long as at least 10% of the conFor the last two years, Dan (whose favorite films tent was from the NASA archives and uploaded to Vimeo (re-emphasizing CineSpace’s quest for accesinclude Lawrence of Arabia, Red Rock West and Dr. sibility). When speaking with Dan, his enthusiasm for the sheer limitless inspiration of space, and the
Zhivago) has been passionately working on NASA’s creativity he hopes these images will ignite, is infectious…and together with Patrick, their leap of faith
initiative to help make their expansive catalog of visu- in making CineSpace a reality will make you believe anything is possible. With this duo at the helm,
al images captured throughout NASA’s entire space CineSpace was able to gather quite an esteemed roundup for the day’s events at the MFAH (Luke and
exploration program more accessible to the public. Andrew Wilson, Marcol Barmbilla and Academy-nominated screenwriters William Boyles, Jr. and Al
24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year – Reinert) with none other than Houston native Richard Linklater as judge.
NASA is always filming, always capturing. Until
recently it was impractical to access this third-party To quote Linklater, the draw of NASA was an easy one: “As someone who grew up in Houston during
footage, and much of the general public has never the Space Age – a fun, exciting time to be a kid for sure – I’ve always been fascinated by all things
even seen most of these images. Dan’s passion was NASA. I’ve been a big supporter of the Houston Cinema Arts Festival from its beginnings in 2009,
not just abou