Live Oaks shade the campus of Prairie View A&M, an HBCU est’d 1876.
(Prairie View, TX – July 22-26, 2025)
PennWest professor Brian Fuller was among 250 filmmaking instructors from around the world who met outside Houston this week for the University Film and Video Association‘s 79th annual conference. This year’s gathering at Prairie View A&M University marks the first time in UFVA’s 79-year history that an Historically Black College or University has hosted the organization.
Three-time Emmy and Peabody Award-winning documentary filmmaker Laurens Grant kicked off the week with her keynote address, “The Transformative Power of Storytelling.” Grant was co-executive producer of 2024’s Hollywood Black, a four-part docuseries spotlighting Black talent and resistance, starting with the silent film era. The first episode, “Dear Black People,” screened after the keynote. It was followed by a panel discussion.
Screenings dominated the week’s calendar, granting member institutions the opportunity to compare and critique the work of students and faculty. Among the many films shared were narratives
- Shroom Soup in which a grieving Asian American teen struggles to connect with their mom.
- Dark Side of the Moon, a horror short evoking western serials of the 1950s.
- A Man for the Job, telling the story of a young hospital parking valet who befriends a middle-aged patient.
- Golden Years, following an aging couple who spice up their retirement by breaking into luxury homes.
as well as documentaries
- Solastalgia, showing threats posed by uranium extraction to New Mexico’s Navajo communities.
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Prison, demonstrating the transformative effect of live theater at adults in custody
- Qatar Stars. Four-years in the making, the film profiles a multinational girls-only rhythmic gymnastics school in Doha, Qatar.
UFVA Multicam Workshop
While the films were inspirational, there were also hands-on instructional workshops. One of particular value was on teaching multi-camera cinematography. Long a staple of non-fiction, filmmaker David Landau helped professors envision its use for narrative productions. “Especially when you’re demanding intensely emotional performances, it’s a good idea to light and shoot with a couple of cameras, so you can get the long shot and the close-up without putting the actor through the wringer over and over. You’re not cross-shooting like in a flatly staged sit-com; you’re putting both cameras on the same actor, then turning around and repeating the scene in the reverse angle,” advises Landau.
Representatives from Yamdu and Final Draft offered deep-dive tours of their respective software, touting a high-visibility partnership between the two that significantly automates film budgeting and scheduling directly from the script.
A highlight of the annual conference was the Thursday night picnic, offered this year as a rooftop barbecue at POST Houston. Receptions and other social events may be among the most important conference events, as they foster a professional network that connects regional universities like PennWest to schools of other sizes, tuition price-points, and academic missions. Next year’s conference is slated for Augsburg University in Minneapolis.