What’s Up? Doc!

Just as Houston’s third annual Cinema Arts Festival bows, spotlighting films by and about artists and attracting Hollywood A-listers—Tilda Swinton made the scene in 2009 and, just last year, Shirley McLaine and Isabella Rossellini were on hand—a couple of locally made documentary films about offbeat art forms are getting big buzz.

Art Car: The Movie, for one, will be screened on the fest’s closing night this month (for more, see Calendar). And a viewing of the other, Stitched, which delves deep into the shadowy world of “competitive quilting,” is on the agenda at the city’s own International Quilt Festival, which runs Nov. 3-6 at the George R. Brown Convention Center.

“Houston isn’t known as a filmmaking community,” says Picturesmith Productions founder Jena Moreno, 37, who directed Stitched with cameraman husband Tom, 40. “But I wouldn’t want to do this anywhere else.”

Moreno was first inspired to embark on the documentary project six years ago at the same international gathering of quilters, just after hurricanes Katrina and Rita hammered the Gulf Coast. “I thought, ‘Who comes to a hurricane-ravaged area for a convention?’” she says. “People who aren’t quilters don’t realize how big it is. … The Houston convention is on the bucket list of most quilters.”

After a series of delays, Jena and her husband, who had previously only dabbled in filmmaking, began filming at Houston’s 2009 convention. They immediately gravitated to the film’s three main subjects, and followed Caryl Bryer Fallert, Hollis Chatelain and Randall Cook for the next year as they prepared their entries for the 2010 competition. (Fallert mentored Chatelain, and Chatelain mentored Cook, but this was unbeknownst to the filmmakers when they first chose their subjects.)

“A lot call it a hobby,” Jena explains thoughtfully. “Some consider it addiction or therapy. And for some, it’s a career.”

So the Morenos, along with producer Nancy Sarnoff, hit the road, traveling to festivals in New York, Kentucky and across Texas, mingling with “quilting celebrities” and gathering footage of quirky characters. (Among them, Quilt-Man, who rides a Segway around Paducah, Ky., draped in quilts with his skateboarder sidekick.) And after a brief break since debuting the doc at a Cincinnati quilting convention, the trio is promoting their sleeper hit at quilt shows and film festivals around the globe through early next year. North Carolina, Michigan, Ireland and Australia are among the stops.

In their downtime, the Stitched crew often hangs with fellow Houston-based filmmakers, like Alex Luster of the street-art documentary Stick Em Up, and handsome, dry-witted duo Carlton Ahrens and Ford Gunter, both 35, who produced Art Car: The Movie. “Tom and Jena offered to help, and their advice helped a ton,” says Gunter, who echoes Jena’s sentiment that Houston is a great city for unique, creative ventures.

The pair, childhood friends who attended Lamar High School, actually don’t consider themselves particularly artistic. “Well, I tried to make an art car one time out of a piece-of-s*** Jeep Cherokee,” remembers Ahrens. “But my dad sold it out from under me for like two hundred bucks.” Still, ex-Houston Business Journal reporter Gunter and current UH grad student Ahrens decided the city’s quirky, internationally famous Art Car Parade, in which automobiles become a long line of rolling art installations, showcased a unique cross-section of the city, and set out after the 2009 event—eventually quitting their day jobs—to explore the sociology of the art car scene, and how H-Town garnered the title of “Art Car Capital of the World.”

They examined the car’s place in American culture—and specifically in a car-centric city such as Houston—and spoke to more than 50 artists, politicians and historians, like art car documentarian Harrod Blank and California-based artist David Best, who pioneered the movement.

The movie follows Mark “Scrapdaddy” Bradford, a local metalworker, and Rebecca Bass, a teacher at Sam Houston High School, as they prepare their cars for the 2010 parade. And as the duo researched the scene’s main players, they, too, found opportunities to travel cross-country. They jetted to California twice, and also hit events in Baltimore and Louisville, searching for reasons why people transform their autos into art. They, like Moreno, found that some view the process as a hobby, while others use the parade as a marketing tool to further their careers.

“Basically, if you have the balls to do this to your car, you’ll get immediate respect,” says Gunter. “Not all are in the same league, but the stage is open to all—and that ideology is important.”

Perhaps it’s especially important in Houston. Says Gunter, “There’s something to be said for the fact that this stereotypical oil town or cow town has this infrastructure in place where… forms of self-expression really thrive.”