Where to screen your independent film in Texas.

You finished the film. You made it here, with a Texas crew, probably on a Texas budget. Now it needs a room with a screen, a projector that plays what you have, and a person who will say yes. The festival circuit is one answer and everyone knows it. The other answer is the state’s independent screens, and nobody has written them down in one place.

This is that list. It covers every locally owned or nonprofit theater, microcinema, museum cinema, civic hall with a projector, and drive-in in Texas that publishes a way for a filmmaker to get a film on its screen, plus the festivals that stand in for theaters in the places that have none. Every entry was checked against the venue’s own website on September 4, 2026. Where a venue publishes rates, the regional edition links to the page rather than repeating the number, because rates change and the page is the source. Where a detail is not on the venue’s site, it is not stated. Where a site could not be reached, the entry says so and tells you to call.

What is not here: AMC, Cinemark, Regal, Flix, Cinergy, Premiere, Studio Movie Grill, and the rest of the chains. Alamo Drafthouse, which has belonged to Sony since 2024 and still hosts local screenings through its programmers. Violet Crown, which sold to Evo in 2023. Santikos, San Antonio’s foundation-owned circuit, which runs 27 theaters in eight states by its own count. Some of those will screen your film. They are not independent, and this is a list of what is.

The three doors.

The first door is programming. Someone whose job is choosing films chooses yours. In Texas that is a short list: AFS Cinema and Hyperreal in Austin, the Texas Theatre in Dallas, Aurora Picture Show and Rice Cinema in Houston, Slab in San Antonio, the Laredo Film Society, ENTRE in Harlingen, CineMarfa at the Crowley, and the museum programs at the Modern in Fort Worth, the MFAH, and the McNay. Some publish open calls. Hyperreal takes shorts year-round and prioritizes Texas filmmakers. Aurora’s Extremely Shorts takes films of three minutes or less. Most do not publish anything, and the ask is an email to a curator. It costs nothing and the odds are what they are.

The second door is renting the room. You pay, you keep the door, you sell the tickets or give them away. This is where most of the list lives, and it is where the surprises are. The cheapest rentable screens in Texas are city-owned single screens in the Panhandle and East Texas with rate sheets posted online. The most capable is probably MATCH in Houston, a 323-seat room with a true cinema projector and subsidized rates for fiscally sponsored, arts-focused, public events. The most filmmaker-literate is the Texas Theatre, which publishes a service menu with four-wall runs, tech screenings, and DCP creation on it.

The third door is a festival that owns or borrows a room. In El Paso, the Valley, the Coastal Bend, Denton, and most of East Texas, the festival is the theater. Several pay: Plaza Classic’s Local Flavor in El Paso, the El Paso Film Festival’s local award, Flatland’s High Plains Hero in Lubbock. Several prefer you: the Nac Short Film Festival gives preference to films completed in East Texas, Tyler says it has a special fondness for local work, CineFestival prioritizes films tied to San Antonio and Texas, and the Houston Filmmaker Showcase requires a Houston key creative and charges nothing.

The five things that decide yes or no.

Format, first and always. AFS rents DCP only and says no other file type will be accepted. MATCH, the Texas Theatre, River Oaks, and Rice have DCP. Almost everyone else plays Blu-ray, a file over HDMI, or a DVD, and several say so in writing: Old Town Theatre in Huntsville, the Perot in Texarkana, URBAN-15, the State in Gainesville, which cannot play Blu-ray at all. Know what you have before you call, and expect to bring more than one thing.

Lead time. The El Paso cultural center wants twelve weeks. The El Paso Museum of Art prefers eight. AFS needs the DCP five business days out. The Pines in Lufkin has no weekends left in 2026. Liberty Hall in Tyler wants the signed contract and full payment within two weeks of sending it. A premiere date is the last thing you set, not the first.

Rights. Every rental contract asks who holds the screening rights, and several venues charge or facilitate licensing fees for public showings: Liberty Hall in Tyler, the Fair in Plainview, Slab’s outdoor screens. You are the rights holder. Say it in the first email and that line item disappears.

Insurance. The Guadalupe and Old Town Theatre require a certificate naming them as additional insured, the Carver requires coverage and states the limits, and the El Paso Museum of Art requires a tenant liability policy. Budget a short-term event policy; it is a real cost and a small one.

Tickets. Some houses make you sell them. Liberty Hall requires the renter to sell on the hall’s seat map. Some houses sell them for you and take a cut: the Perot’s rate is the greater of a flat fee or a percentage of gross. One house turns that into an asset: the Paramount in Abilene requires its own box office, charges nothing for it, and includes an email to its patron list in the deal. Read the ticket clause before the rate.

The regional editions.

Austin and Central Texas. Twelve rooms and four to call first. The city lost Violet Crown and the Alamo to acquisitions and the Paramount to restoration, and what remains is a nonprofit with two screens, a microcinema with an open call, and a 110-seat neighborhood house that lists local premieres first. Plus Taylor, Belton, Waco, Kerrville, Llano, and two drive-ins.

Dallas, Fort Worth and North Texas. Eleven rooms. One theater built for filmmakers and a Fort Worth that has lost four venues in four years, including the Coyote Drive-In on September 7, 2026. The historic houses in Gainesville and Corsicana publish full rate cards; most of the big-city rooms do not.

Houston, the Gulf Coast and the Brazos Valley. Thirteen rooms and a showcase. The best of them are an arts center, a museum, and a nonprofit microcinema, not movie theaters. Two venues price a film screening as its own line item. River Oaks is back and its ownership is a question you should read before you call.

San Antonio and South Texas. Sixteen rooms and festivals. One art house, the civic halls that do the real four-walling, Laredo’s only non-chain screen, an artist-run film center in Harlingen, and a Coastal Bend and Valley where the festivals are the theaters.

El Paso and the Big Bend. Six rooms and three festivals. No independent theater in the city, two festivals that pay local filmmakers, and a nonprofit in Marfa that lends its 168 seats at no charge to public programming that serves the area.

Lubbock, the Panhandle and the Big Country. Fourteen rooms. Community-owned single screens with rate sheets, from Wellington to Plainview, and the region where a filmmaker is most likely to be the only thing playing on a Friday night.

East Texas and the Piney Woods. Six rooms and five festivals. City-owned houses that rent for film with the paperwork posted, a Mineola single screen that has shown movies since 1920, and no drive-in anywhere.

What this list is not.

It is not a promise that a venue will say yes, and it is not current past the day it was checked. Theaters close, sell, and change their rate sheets without telling anyone. If you find an entry that is wrong or a room that is missing, email info@goldsmithpictures.com and the edition gets corrected, with your name on the correction if you want it there. A directory that never corrects itself is not one.

It is also not the festival circuit, and it is not distribution. It is the map of where a finished Texas film can play in Texas, for the filmmaker who wants a room full of people who will recognize the street in the third scene.

If your film is not finished yet, that is the part we do. For filmmakers explains how, and if the honest answer is that you don’t need us yet, that is the answer you will get. The AFS grant machine is a good place to start if the problem is money rather than a screen.