The El Paso Community Foundation’s Plaza Classic Film Festival is accepting submissions for its ninth annual Local Flavor showcase and awards. More than $3,500 in cash prizes will be awarded.
First prize is $1,500, with a second prize of $1,000, $750 third prize, $250 audience favorite award, and a $100 student award for a college or high school student entry.
There is no cost to submit a film. It’s FREE. Entry deadline is 11:59 p.m. Monday, June 22, 2026.
It’s generously sponsored by the El Paso Film and Creative Industries Commission and the Texas Film Commission.
Local Flavor is accepting short and feature-length films. Works-in-progress will not be accepted. Projects must have been completed on or after January 1, 2025 and must be made locally, set locally, or have a connection of some kind to the El Paso-Juárez-Las Cruces area, which should be noted in the entry form’s synopsis window.
A panel of judges will select submissions for the Local Flavor showcase and awards in the Plaza Theatre on Sunday, July 26, the last day of the film festival. Awards will be announced at the end of the program.
Local Flavor will be curated by Emmy Award-winning Producer Javier Gonzalez of El Paso (Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, In the Summers); Jaime Mendez, Ed.D, the UTEP Assistant Dean for Student Support and a longtime PCFF program advisory committee member; and Sophia Santos, a 2024 UCLA film school graduate from El Paso.
Go to the Local Flavor page to submit. Call 915-533-4020 or email local@plazaclassic.com for more information.
The Plaza Classic Film Festival returns for its 19th year July 16-26, 2026. Festival passes are on sale here.
Join us for the sixth season of the Plaza Classic Podcast, hosted by Lisa Elliott and Stephanie Valle.
They’re five episodes into the new season, which began last month with an interview with now departed El Paso Film Commissioner Drew Mayer-Oakes, who left earlier this year to take a similar position in Corpus Christi.
Film noir expert (and PCFF 2024 guest) Alan Rode is featured on the second episode of the season. The third episode highlights how teen dating violence is depicted in films with guest Aaron Setliff, the division chief of the protective order unit in the County Attorney’s office and board chair of the Center Against Sexual and Family Violence.
Episode 4 features PCFF contributor Rebecca Mendez of the Community Foundation of Southern New Mexico discussing “What Rob Reiner Taught Us About Love” and the recently posted fifth episode features longtime PCFF contributor Jack Fields talking about his love of movies and how the NMSU grad gets to indulge that living in Los Angeles.
Lisa, Stephanie, Rebecca, and Jack are all members of the Plaza Classic Film Festival Program Advisory Committee, which helps plan and stage the film festival. The 19th annual PCFF will be July 16-26 in and around the historic Plaza Theatre. Passes are on sale now.
They’re back!
Buddy the Elf, Jack Skellington, George Bailey, Kevin McAllister, Santa Claus and the Grinch return for the El Paso Community Foundation Plaza Classic Film Festival’s FREE Holiday Movies at the Plaza Theatre, part of the City of El Paso’s WinterFest.
Admission is FREE. No tickets are required.
The Plaza Classic will show six holiday favorites over three weekends. Audiences can enjoy holiday music played live on the theater’s original Wyler Mighty Wurlitzer Pipe Organ 30 minutes before each movie.
The schedule is:
Sunday, November 30
3 pm: Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (PG)
5:30 pm: Home Alone (PG)
Sunday, December 7
2:30 pm: It’s a Wonderful Life (PG)
6 pm: Elf (PG)
Sunday, December 21
3 pm: The Polar Express (G)
6 pm: Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas (PG)
This is the 14th year the Plaza Classic will show holiday movies. It is part of the City of El Paso’s annual WinterFest, which runs November 22-January 4. WinterFest includes the specially decorated San Jacinto Plaza, The Rink at the convention center, and opens at 5 pm Saturday, November 22 with the Scherr Legate WinterFest Lights Parade and tree lighting ceremony at 5 pm at San Jacinto Plaza.
The 19th annual Plaza Classic Film Festival will be July 16-26, 2026 in and around the Plaza Theatre. Passes are on sale now here.
The seventh annual edition of the binational Oculto Film Fest returns to El Paso’s Philanthropy Theatre (in the Plaza Theatre Performing Arts Centre) on October 24-25.
It features two days of feature and short films from around the world, including director Juan Albarracin’s 2025 Spanish film festival favorite El Instinto and Arturo and Ray Ambriz’s Soy Frankelda, Mexico’s first stop-motion animated film.
Oculto also will feature a panel discussion with some of El Paso’s top filmmakers, including Lucky McKee (May, The Woman, Poker Face), Dakota Thomas (Crawford) and Genaro Limon, and a stop-motion animation discussion by Mexican filmmakers Cecilia Andalón and Rafael Ruiz, whose short film Dolores was recently up for Mexico’s Ariel Award for animated short film.
The program also includes short films made by local filmmakers through Oculto’s 48-hour film challenge, sponsored by the Star Central Studios Learning Center, which is this weekend. Prize-winning films from the competition will be shown during Oculto.
This is the third year that Oculto, an affiliate of the El Paso Community Foundation, will be held in El Paso. It originated in Juárez, where it returns November 1-2.
Tickets for the El Paso screenings are $5 for each event, $15 for a two-day pass, on sale at the Plaza Theatre Box Office and Ticketmaster.com.
Here’s the schedule for the El Paso portion of the festival:
Friday, October 24
• 5:30-6 pm — Red Carpet Opening Ceremony, Plaza Theatre entrance. Free
• 6-7:30 pm — 48 Hour short films block, Philanthropy Theatre. $5.
• 8-9:30 pm — El Instinto (Spain), Philanthropy Theatre. $5.
• 10 pm-12 am — Dinner at Mesa St. Grill (entry with screening ticket)
Saturday, October 25
• 3-5 pm — Soy Frankelda, Philanthropy Theatre. $5.
• 5-6 pm — Filmmaker Panel Discussion with Lucky McKee, Genaro Limon, Dakota Thomas, Christopher Velasquez, Nahomi Gomez, and Alfredo Castruita, Philanthropy Theatre. $5.
• 6-7:30 pm — Short Film Block (Bloody Glamping, The Last Word, Simcha, Il Colore dela Notte, Virgin Killer, The Nightmare Catchers), Philanthropy Theatre. $5.
• 7:30-9 pm — Q&A with Mexican animated filmmakers Cecilia Andalón and Rafael Ruiz, Philanthropy Theatre. $5.
• 9 pm-12 am — Closing ceremony, Alcantar Sky Garden (entry with screening ticket).
Information: ocultofilmfest.com.
The Howl of the Furies (El turno de la aullante) took the $1,500 first prize in this year’s eighth annual Local Flavor Showcase and Awards in the El Paso Community Foundation’s Plaza Classic Film Festival on July 27. Local Flavor was sponsored by the El Paso Film and Creative Industries Commission, whose Director Drew Mayer-Oakes presented the awards, and the Texas Film Commission.
About 300 people attended this year’s Local Flavor in the Plaza Theatre. It featured 11 local and locally connected short films, which were chosen by a panel of judges from among nearly 50 submissions. A public reception for the filmmakers followed in the El Paso Community Foundation Room.
Howl was written and directed by Bayron Norman of Torreón, Coahuila, MX. Two UTEP alumni worked on the film — script supervisor Alejandra Lozano and soundtrack vocalist Mar Lozano. The 26-minute film is about a tortured woman who waits to exact revenge on the man who killed her family.
The $1,000 second prize went to El Paso filmmaker Diego Muñoz Holguín for his autobiographical short Sombras Nada Mas, about the trauma of being kidnapped at gunpoint as a youth in Ciudad Juárez. It was a good Plaza Classic for Muñoz, who also was the subject of a sold-out showcase of several of his works on July 24 in the Philanthropy Theatre (Sombras Nada Mas was not part of that program).
There was a two-way tie, a first, for the $750 third prize, with Local Flavor 2021 award winner Celina Galicia and Plaza Classic Film Camp alum Harmony Schlesinger sharing the award.
Galicia’s documentary Ternura Radical dealt with ongoing femicides in Juárez. Ternura Radical is also part of this year’s ninth annual Femme Frontera Filmmaker Showcase, which played the Philanthropy Theatre on July 26. Schlesinger’s I Like You a Bot is a whimsical short about a well-programmed robot that has difficulties navigating the end of a romantic relationship.
We also had a two-way tie for the $250 Audience Favorite Award, which was determined by an audience text-to-vote procedure. Samuel Thomas Garcia was selected for his witty genre piece Brooklyn Love, which shared the award with Dakota Thomas for the lush, nostalgic Crawford, about the waning days of Joan Crawford’s career.
Garcia, a student at New Mexico State University and Doña Ana Community College, also won the $100 College Film Award for Brooklyn Love, while Hanks High School student Theresita Acosta won the $50 High School Film Award for her sci-fi fantasy The Tooth Fixation.
For the third year, Local Flavor judges were film producer Javier Gonzalez, filmmaker and NMSU associate film professor Ilana Glassco Lapid and Asia Saucedo of the Plaza Classic Film Festival program advisory committee.
Submissions for next year’s Local Flavor will open in March. It’s free to submit. PCFF 2026 will be July 16-26 in and around the Plaza Theatre.
