Houston Cinema Arts Society Celebrates Space City with a Family Friendly Drive In Double Feature

Houston Cinema Arts Society (HCAS) is landing at the Showboat Drive-In for a Space City themed double feature of Neon films Spaceship Earth and Apollo 11 on June 11th at 8:30pm. This family friendly outdoor event offers viewers a chance to see two documentary highlights from previous Sundance Film Festivals on the big screen with the SpaceX rocket launches fresh in the imagination. This program is co-presented with CineSpace, HCAS’s collaborative short film competition with NASA. Both Spaceship Earth and Apollo 11 are notable for their innovative use of archival footage, and HCAS hopes they will inspire filmmakers in the audience to submit to CineSpace for a new special prize for Best Film Using Exclusively NASA Archival Footage.  This special prize was created in response to the pandemic to create an opportunity for filmmakers to make films entirely from home.

Director Matt Wolf (Spaceship Earth, Recorder: The Marion Strokes Project) will join HCAS Marketing Manager Michael Robinson for a Instagram Live conversation preceding the showing on June 10th at 4pm at @cinemahtx. 

Spaceship Earth is the true, stranger-than-fiction, adventure of eight visionaries who in 1991 spent two years quarantined inside of a self-engineered replica of Earth’s ecosystem called BIOSPHERE 2. The experiment was a worldwide phenomenon, chronicling daily existence in the face of life threatening ecological disaster and a growing criticism that it was nothing more than the escapade of a cult. The bizarre story is both a cautionary tale and a hopeful lesson of how a small group of dreamers can potentially reimagine a new world.

Director Todd Douglas Miller (Dinosaur 13) finalizes a cinematic event fifty years in the making with Apollo 11. Crafted from a newly discovered trove of 65mm footage and more than 11,000 hours of uncatalogued audio recordings, Apollo 11 takes us straight to the heart of NASA’s most celebrated mission—the one that first put men on the moon and forever made Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin into household names. From the perspectives of the astronauts,  Mission Control, and millions of spectators on the ground, we vividly experience those momentous days and hours in 1969 when humankind took a giant leap into the future.

CineSpace is a short film competition created by NASA and HCAS that offers filmmakers around the world a chance to share work inspired by exploration of the NASA archives and created using NASA archival footage. Winners and finalists are announced and screened at the annual Houston Cinema Arts Festival.

Due to the landscape of collaborative filmmaking in this time of pandemic, there are many limitations on filmmakers’ abilities to shoot or acquire new footage and interface with production crews and talent.  In response to these limitations, CineSpace created a new prize for Best Film Using Exclusively NASA Archival Footage. This award challenges filmmakers to take a deep dive into NASA’s archives and create short films using exclusively NASA archival footage. Filmmakers are encouraged to search for unusual or not commonly used footage. These archival films can include NASA audio and/or graphics from any publicly available sources and can span any genre.

For more information, visit https://www.cinemahtx.org/event/spaceship-earth-apollo-11-double-feature/