Levantine

Trey Edward Shults wrote, directed, and produced Krisha, based on his short film of the same name.  Mot of the cast is comprised of the members of his own family in a drama filmed and set in Houston, Texas, over a turbulent Thanksgiving weekend.  The film swept the Audience and Jury Prizes at SXSW in 2015.

Trey was born in 1988 in Houston, Texas.  His first foray into the film industry was working in the camera department as a film loader on Terrance Malick’s upcoming Voyage of Time and as an intern on Malick’s The Tree of Life.  Shults’ short film, Krisha, premiered at SXSW in 2014 in the Narrative Shorts category, where it was awarded Special Jury Recognition for Cinematography.  The short went on to play at many other film festivals, including the HollyShorts Film Festival, where it won the award for Best Narrative Short.  In the summer of 2014, he completed the feature version of Krisha.  It is Shults’ first feature film.

Ivory, a three-time Academy Award-nominee (A Room With a View, Howards End, The Remains of the Day) will present three of his films at HCAF 2014. He will receive the Levantine Award, presented by Levantine Films, before showing his most recent feature, City of Your Final Destination (2009), accompanied by novelist Peter Cameron. Ivory also will present and discuss one of his personal favorites, Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (1990), based on the Evan S. Connell novel, and The Remains of the Day (1993), based on the Kazuo Ishiguro novel. He follows previous Levantine Award winners Isabella Rossellini (2010), Ethan Hawke (2011), Robert Redford (2012) and Richard Linklater (2013).

The award presentation was followed by a special 20th anniversary screening of Dazed and Confused.

Richard Linklater, born in Houston and raised in nearby Huntsville, has been a supporter of the HCAF since its inception. He attended the festival in 2009 with Me and Orson Welles and brought his friend Ethan Hawke to join him in presenting Tape in 2011. He will receive the Levantine Award amidst a career renaissance with the 2013 release of one of his finest and most popular films, Before Midnight, following 2012’s equally well-received Bernie.

Included in Quentin Tarantino’s list of the 10 greatest films of all time, Richard Linklater’s cult classic has become part of the lexicon of film history and thus required viewing for aspiring filmmakers (and stoners). On its twentieth anniversary, Linklater told The Daily Beast what inspired his unique take on the teen movie genre: “I wanted to capture the feeling of driving around, trying to be cool. It was tone and atmosphere. That’s what was churning around inside me. The mooood.”

Set on the last day of school at Lee High School in the suburbs of Austin, Texas, the film follows the activities of a group of students as they celebrate the arrival of summer. When classes end, the incoming freshman boys are hunted down and hazed by the senior boys while the incoming freshman girls are rounded up and suffer the same fate at the hand of the senior girls. Randall “Pink” Floyd, the school’s star football player, is asked to sign a pledge promising not to take drugs during the summer or do anything that would “jeopardize the goal of a championship season”. Eventually, the students’ various paths lead to an awesome keg party at the Moontower.

Film critic Roger Ebert praised the film as “art crossed with anthropology” with a “painful underside”. In her review for The Austin Chronicle, Marjorie Baumgarten praised Matthew McConaughey’s film debut stating, “He is a character we’re all too familiar with in the movies but McConaughey nails this guy without a hint of condescension or whimsy, claiming this character for all time as his own”.

Robert Redford, renowned actor, film director, environmentalist, and founder of the Sundance Film Festival, will receive the 3rd Annual Levantine Cinema Arts Award at the 2012 Houston Cinema Arts Festival on November 9, 2012. Redfordʼs work in such classics as BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID, THE STING, THE WAY WE WERE, OUT OF AFRICA has been widely lauded and recognized. But it is his directing that has earned him his greatest acclaim. Redford won a Directors Guild of America Award, a Golden Globe Award and the Academy Award for Best Director for his directorial debut on the emotionally shattering family drama, ORDINARY PEOPLE. He earned dual Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Best Director in 1994 for helming QUIZ SHOW and two Golden Globe nominations (Best Picture and Best Director) for THE HORSE WHISPERER in 1998.

In 1981, Redford founded the Sundance Institute, a global, nonprofit cultural organization dedicated to nurturing artistic expression in film and theater, and to supporting intercultural dialogue between artists and audiences. The non-for-profit Sundance Institute is internationally recognized for its annual Sundance Film Festival as well as its artistic development programs, which include the Screenwriting, Directing, Theatre, Music Composition and Producing Labs.

Over a career spanning more than half a century, Robert Redford has come to personify the artist as both steward and generator of culture. Mr. Redford is a veritable cinematic icon and civic leader, to whom Levantine Entertainment is honored to present its Levantine Cinema Arts Award.

Ethan Hawke, born in Austin, Texas in 1970, is best known for his film performances, from his star-making appearances in Dead Poets Society and Reality Bites through his Academy Award-nominated turn in Training Day, with Gattaca, Hamlet, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, and many others along the way. His talents and accomplishments, however, extend far beyond film acting, and it is this broad artistic resume that has inspired Levantine Entertainment and the Houston Cinema Arts Society to award him the Levantine Cinema Arts Award.

On stage he starred in Lincoln Center’s Coast of Utopia, which was nominated for more Tony Awards than any play in history. He also starred in Jack O’Brien‘s production of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, which won the Tony for best revival. Off Broadway he had a smash success in The New Group’s revival of David Rabe’s Hurlyburly. Recently, he has directed two plays for The New Group: Jonathan Marc Sherman’s Things We Want and Sam Shepard’s A Lie of the Mind. He has been nominated for a Drama Desk Award as both an actor and a director.

Rossellini made her film debut with a brief appearance as a nun opposite her mother in the 1976 film A Matter of Time. Her first role was the 1979 film Il Prato. She did not become successful with acting until after her mother’s death in 1982, when she was cast in her first American film, White Nights (1985). She is probably best known for her pivotal role as the tortured nightclub singer Dorothy Vallens in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, in which she also did her own singing. Some other notable film roles include her work in Cousins, Death Becomes Her, Immortal Beloved, and Fearless.

The Levantine Cinema Arts Award honors a leading actor, director, or other creative artist who has stretched the boundaries of cinematic expression throughout an illustrious film career. The presentation of the award will be accompanied by a gala screening of a new or classic work followed by an on-stage interview with the artist.