The Levantine Films 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 is usually accompanied by a gala screening of a new or classic work followed by an on-stage interview with the artist.
2015 Trey Shults
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.
2014 James Ivory
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,
2013 Richard Linklater
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,
2012 Robert Redford
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,
2011 Ethan Hawke
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.
2010 Isabella Rossellini
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,
SAVE THE DATE
Houston Cinema Arts Festival
November 10-17, 2022