El Paso, TX

July 18 - July 28, 2024 • El Paso, TX

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Local Flavor titles, programs announced


June 25

The El Paso Community Foundation’s 10th annual Plaza Classic Film Festival is pleased to announce the selections for this year’s Local Flavor showcase.

Local Flavor, generously sponsored by the Texas Film Commission, is the region’s largest showcase of independently made shorts, features, animated, documentaries, music videos, and experimental films.

The 10th annual Plaza Classic Film Festival is August 3-13, 2017 in and around the Plaza Theatre.

Previous Local Flavor showcases have included works by At the Drive-In and The Mars Volta guitarist Omar Rodriguez Lopez, El Paso filmmaker Zach Passero, cinematographer Ellie Ann Fenton, and NMSU Creative Media Institute faculty members Ilana Lapid and Ross Marks.

This year’s series will showcase three features in the Philanthropy Theatre, three programs of shorts in the Foundation Room, projects made by the students in our third annual Plaza Classic Film Camp and a matinee that will include winners from the Downtown Management District’s Reel Authentico contest.

The fun begins with the 13th annual The Good, The Bad, The Indie at 8 p.m. Friday, August 4 in the Foundation Room, 333 N. Oregon.

Go to plazaclassic.com/localflavor for the full list of programs.


Animators Don Bluth & Gary Goldman heading to PCFF


June 19

Animation icons Don Bluth, an El Paso native, and Gary Goldman will appear at the El Paso Community Foundation’s 10th annual Plaza Classic Film Festival, which will be August 3-13 in downtown El Paso.

Bluth & Goldman will appear for an on-stage interview before a screening of their 1982 animated hit The Secret of NIMH at 1:30 p.m. Saturday, August 12 in the Plaza Theatre. They also will sit down for a Q&A during PCFF’s free, annual Filmmaker’s Brunch at 11 a.m. Sunday, August 13 in the Foundation Room, 333 N. Oregon.

A retrospective of their movies — including Banjo the Woodpile Cat, An American Tail, The Land Before Time, Anastasia, All Dogs Go to Heaven, and Titan A.E. — will be shown during the Plaza Classic Film Festival. The 1980 movie Xanadu, which includes a two-minute animated sequence by Bluth & Goldman, also will be shown.

The Plaza Classic Film Festival’s seventh annual collaboration with the El Paso Museum of Art includes the exhibition An American Animator, Don Bluth. It features nearly 50 of Bluth’s drawings, sketches, animation cels and other examples of his hand-drawn animation style. They are on loan from the Savannah College of Art and Design, to which they donated their animation archives from several films. It will be up July 1 through September 7 in the Peter and Margaret DeWetter Gallery.

Bluth & Goldman’s last six movies, including Thumbelina and Anastasia, will be shown for free in the museum’s auditorium.

As a boy, Bluth wanted to work for Walt Disney Productions after seeing the 1944 reissue of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in El Paso. His family later moved to Utah, then California. Bluth worked with Watsonville, CA native Goldman on several Disney movies. They left in 1979 to start their own independent animation company with fellow animator John Pomeroy. They currently are working on a movie version of their popular ‘80s arcade game Dragon’s Lair.


Banners are up! 'Psycho' coming to PCFF 2017


June 8

Our banners just went up around downtown El Paso!

It’s hard to believe, but the El Paso Community Foundation’s 10th annual Plaza Classic Film Festival is just two months away.

We’re celebrating the new banners by announcing 10 more of the movies we’ll be showing at this year’s 10th anniversary edition of the Plaza Classic, which will be Aug. 3-13 in and around the Plaza Theatre. We’re bringing back several “greatest hits” of past Plaza Classics, and plenty of classics we’ve never shown before.

They include:

Psycho (1960), the Hitchcock classic that made a country think twice about showering alone was a bit hit at PCFF 2010.

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), a legal drama about race in the South that features a signature performance by Gregory Peck, was an audience favorite at PCFF 2012.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), a revelation on the big screen at our first festival, then called The Movies Return to the Plaza Theatre, in 2008.

An American in Paris (1951), we showed the six-time Academy Award-winning song-and-dance musical starring Gene Kelly in 2012.

El Mariachi (1992), Texas writer-director Robert Rodriguez’s low-budget breakthrough makes its PCFF debut.

Sabrina (1954), featuring Audrey Hepburn as an absolute charmer opposite William Holden and Humphrey Bogart, charmed a big PCFF 2012 audience, too.

From Russia With Love (1963), the second James Bond movie about the debonair spy’s attempts to help a Russian defector, makes its Plaza Classic debut.

Shane (1953), the George Stevens drama about a former gunslinger drawn into a conflict between a farmer and a cattle baron, was shown at PCFF 2009.

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), a classic ’50s sci-fi black-and-white about an alien visitor who tries to deliver a warning to earthlings, was part of our first festival in 2008.

The Muppet Movie (1979), kids of all ages will get a kick out of this enduring musical comedy starring Kermit, Miss Piggy and the gang, which made its PCFF debut in 2011.

These are in addition to the 20 movies we’ve already announced, including the PCFF debut of Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Casablanca, Singin’ in the Rain, The Graduate, Jaws, Citizen Kane, The Maltese Falcon, Romancing the Stone, Monty Python’s Life of Brian and Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery.


'Snow White' coming to 10th annual PCFF


May 25

Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is considered one of the greatest animated movies ever made — and it’s coming to the El Paso Community Foundation’s 10th annual Plaza Classic Film Festival.

It’s the 80th anniversary of the animated classic, which was Walt Disney’s first feature-length animated film.

This marks the first time Snow White will be shown at the Plaza Classic Film Festival.

The 10th anniversary edition of the Plaza Classic will run from Aug. 3-13 in and around El Paso’s Plaza Theatre. We will be bringing back some of our “greatest hits” and showing a lot more movies we’ve never shown before.

In honor of our birthday, we are announcing 10 more titles we’ve lined up for this summer.

In addition to Snow White, we’ll show:

Romancing the Stone (1984)

The Unsinkable Molly Brown, with El Paso native Debbie Reynolds (1964)

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978)

Cronos (1993)

The Secret of NIMH, directed by El Paso native Don Bluth (1982)

An American in Paris (1951)

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

Festival passes are on sale now by clicking here. Individual tickets go on sale in early July.


Plaza Classic Film Camp returns


May 12

The El Paso Community Foundation’s Plaza Classic Film Camp, sponsored by One Source Federal Credit Union, will be bigger and better this summer.

The third annual camp will offer separate two-week camps — one for animation; the other for live-action filmmaking.

The concurrent camps will run weekdays from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. July 31-August 4 and August 7-11 at the El Paso Public Library Main Branch, 501 N. Oregon, in downtown El Paso.

Enrollment is open to children between the ages of 9 and 16.

Experienced faculty will focus on the fundamentals of filmmaking. During the two-week intensive camp, students will learn to conceive, write, storyboard, shoot and edit their own films.

Their finished movies will be shown in a free, public program during the 10th annual Plaza Classic Film Festival August 3-13 in downtown El Paso.

Tuition is $300 through July 16, 2017; $325 from July 17-23, 2017. Tuition includes materials, lunch, snacks and t-shirts. Applicants are asked to submit short videos or essays about why they want to participate in the Plaza Classic Film Camp.

Thanks to One Source Federal Credit Union, scholarships will be available to children who qualify based on income.

Registration is available online at plazaclassic.com/summer_camp.