{"id":387962,"date":"2026-07-27T17:57:20","date_gmt":"2026-07-27T17:57:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/387962\/"},"modified":"2026-07-27T17:57:20","modified_gmt":"2026-07-27T17:57:20","slug":"qa-oak-cliff-film-festival-co-director-shares-details-ahead-of-15th-annual-festival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/387962\/","title":{"rendered":"Q&A: Oak Cliff Film Festival co-director shares details ahead of 15th annual festival"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Photo courtesy of Oak Cliff Film Festival<\/p>\n

From the historic Texas Theatre<\/a> to venues around the neighborhood, the Oak Cliff Film Festival<\/a> has spent 15 years celebrating independent filmmakers while highlighting our neighborhood\u2019s creative spirit.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The festival returns Thursday, July 30 through Sunday, Aug. 2, with a \u201csunset\u201d and \u201cgolden hour\u201d theme to celebrate another year of world premieres, filmmaker conversations and screenings throughout Oak Cliff.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We caught up with Ashton Campbell, festival co-director, who has helped shape the event for the past 11 years to learn more about what to expect and be excited for with this year\u2019s edition.<\/p>\n

Can you tell me about the vision behind this year\u2019s festival?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s our 15th festival, and we wouldn\u2019t be here this long without\u00a0 the community and the neighborhood. This year\u2019s festival is really a love letter to Oak Cliff.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ll see a lot of Oak Cliff and the people behind it. We\u2019ve always had just amazing support from the neighborhood, local businesses, artists and the community as a whole. That culture is part of our identity and our DNA, and so we wanted to showcase that.<\/p>\n

What can a first time attendee expect?\u00a0<\/p>\n

I hope they walk into a place where they feel extremely welcomed and comfortable, surrounded by people with the same goal of celebrating independent film.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re just there to experience film. There\u2019s nothing like sitting in a movie theater watching a film with people you don\u2019t know, and you just kind of zone out. You just get immersed in this other world. You watch something else on screen that is not your reality. I think that people coming to the festival will look around and realize that they\u2019re in a place with like-minded people.<\/p>\n

I would love to talk to more first timers while they\u2019re there about what they\u2019re experiencing, so if you\u2019re reading this, come and find me.<\/p>\n

Are there any filmmakers or films this year that you are excited for the audience to experience?<\/p>\n

We have a world premiere for a documentary called Tracers. It\u2019s a fantastic documentary about a group of Vietnam veterans. When they came back, they found an outlet for their PTSD through creating a theatrical play about Vietnam, and then it kind of took off from there. It\u2019s a really great film. I\u2019m a big fan of that one.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Buddy is our Saturday night film. It\u2019s a kind of a twisted, dark horror comedy. Imagine if Barney, the dinosaur, had a rampaging lunatic kind of vibe, which is kind of like you know that\u2019s typical for our programming is finding weird, interesting stuff.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve got Pulp Fiction, and we\u2019ve got the writer coming, and he\u2019s going to do a Q and A, which is going to be amazing.<\/p>\n

The opening night film, The Sun Never Sets. I\u2019m excited about that because Joe Swanberg, the director, was our opening night filmmaker in 2013 for Drinking Buddies. It\u2019s great that we\u2019re getting him back. He\u2019s the only filmmaker to ever do two opening night films, which is pretty awesome.<\/p>\n

The closing night film, The Best Summer, is another film I\u2019m pretty excited about. It\u2019s a bunch of backstage footage from a music fest in Australia in the \u201990s with a lot of amazing artists of that era: Sonic Youth, Bikini Kill, Beastie Boys, Foo Fighters. The list goes on and on. A filmmaker who was a music video director was just back there filming stuff behind the scenes, and then she decided they could talk about it 30 years later, so that\u2019s really I\u2019m really excited about that as well.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What\u2019s the most rewarding part of directing this festival?<\/p>\n

I love cinema. I went to film school. I love celebrating films. I love independent film. I love having a place where people can come and experience independent films that they probably wouldn\u2019t get a chance to see otherwise, if it wasn\u2019t for our fest, and that is very rewarding.<\/p>\n

I think just people being able to experience films they normally wouldn\u2019t be able to see, and being able to walk up to a filmmaker and talk to them and just hang out with them. When I see that happening, it always makes me really happy, and it\u2019s pretty rewarding. But just being a part of the film community in Dallas and actually doing something that I think is helping the film community and giving back is really rewarding.<\/p>\n

Is there anything else you want people to know about this year\u2019s festival?<\/p>\n

I think this is a really strong year for documentaries, and you can tell because we programmed a lot of them. There were so many that we just couldn\u2019t say no to, and so I\u2019m really excited for people to come out and learn about things that they might not have known about before. We programmed some just banger documentaries this year that are kind of under the radar and that people are really going to enjoy as long as they get exposed to them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The full festival schedule and more information can be found here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Photo courtesy of Oak Cliff Film Festival From the historic Texas Theatre to venues around the neighborhood, the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":387963,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[102,104,103],"class_list":["post-387962","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-dallas","tag-dallas","tag-dallas-headlines","tag-dallas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387962","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=387962"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387962\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/387963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=387962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=387962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=387962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}