In 2015, Michael Robinson ’17 spent the Houston Cinema Arts Festival inside a projection booth at Rice University, a student worker feeding film through a machine in a building that has since been torn down. This fall, he chooses what plays.
Robinson, who graduated with degrees in visual and dramatic arts as well as anthropology, was named the festival’s lead programmer earlier this year. The job puts him in charge of the entire curatorial vision from the films themselves to the conversations, performances and guest artists built around them. He estimates he will have watched close to 500 films before opening night, narrowing them to roughly 100 selections.
“When I was a student, what would I have wanted to see on the screen and who would I have wanted to meet?” Robinson said. “I’m programming from that place because this is such an opportunity for students.”
The 2026 festival runs Oct. 1-11 at venues across Houston. Screenings return to Rice Oct. 3, 10 and 11 in the Pitman Cinema Theatre inside Susan and Fayez Sarofim Hall and admission is free for currently enrolled Rice students. Nearly every title on the campus schedule arrives with someone attached to it, whether a director, a producer or a subject, for a conversation after the credits.
“It’s amazing to hear from your professors, but seeing a filmmaker and getting to talk to them is a whole other level,” Robinson said.
He arrived at Rice planning to study engineering and spent his early semesters working out what that path would actually lead to. None of the answers held his attention. The art classes he kept signing up for did along with the faculty who taught them.
“‘If I don’t know what I’m going to do after I graduate, let me do what I like and trust the process,’” Robinson said about his thought process at the time.
The projection booth followed, then two years of running film for the festival as a student, a volunteer shift in 2017 and a marketing job with the Houston Cinema Arts Society in 2018 that turned into a role as associate creative director. Robinson also programmed shorts for QFest, Houston’s international LGBTQ+ film festival, and co-founded The Big Queer Picture Show, a monthly series that moves from venue to venue around the city. He is now the assistant director of marketing and communications at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.
The room he is booking has changed since he last worked in it. The 216-seat Pitman Cinema pairs 16 mm and 35 mm projectors with a digital projector that handles standard and silent frame rates as well as 3D, all of it wired to a Dolby Atmos sound system. One festival title will screen in 3D, a format almost no other theater in Houston can play natively.
“I get to say, ‘Look at this brand new, gorgeous cinema built by people who love film,’” Robinson said. “That is really rare.”
The campus lineup opens Oct. 3 with “Adam’s Apple,” a documentary assembled from two decades of family archive footage followed by a conversation with story producer and Rice alumna Amy Hobby. Later that afternoon, artist Lita Albuquerque will appear with critic Jana La Brasca for “The Sea Is Within Me.”
Oct. 10 belongs largely to Borders | No Borders, the regional shorts competition Robinson co-founded with narrative selections at 11 a.m. and documentaries at 2 p.m. “Mickey,” which won the audience award in the global cinema section at this year’s South by Southwest, screens at 5 p.m. with director Dano García and subject Mickey Cundapí.
The closing Sunday reaches back into the university’s own film history. Lecturer and critic Michael Sicinski programmed Now Navigations, an experimental shorts block, for 1 p.m. At 4 p.m., the Pitman will host the first part of “Who Killed Fourth Ward?” on its 50th anniversary with the second and third parts screening in Fourth Ward itself. James Blue, who helped start the Rice Media Center, directed it. Brian Huberman, who joined the Rice faculty in 1975, shot it and will appear alongside editor Ed Hugetz. Retired Rice film program manager Tish Stringer restored it.
“It ties in the legacy of Rice filmmakers who were not just at Rice; they were ingrained in the community,” Robinson said. “This is the Houston story, told by professors who looked at the city and asked what stories needed to be told.”
Many of the shorts began as graduate thesis projects. Their directors will take questions after each block, and they come from Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Mexico rather than from Los Angeles or New York.
“For student filmmakers wondering what happens after graduation, this is the perfect chance to ask someone how they got a film made,” Robinson said. “You can see all of these different filmmaking ecosystems in our own backyard.”
CineSpace, the shorts competition NASA runs with the festival using its own imagery, closes out the campus schedule at 7:30 p.m. Oct. 11. The full lineup is on the Houston Cinema Arts Society website.