New Lone Star director faces challenges after shakeup

July 31,2015

BY CARY DARLING
cdarling@dfw.com

Chad Mathews, a TCU graduate and until recently the executive director of Fredericksburg’s Hill Country Film Festival, has been named director of Fort Worth’s Lone Star Film Society, the organization that runs the annual Lone Star Film Festival.

His appointment caps an uncertain couple of weeks at the Lone Star Film Society in the wake of the resignation of several key staff members, including director Alec Jhangiani and managing director Ramtin Nikzad, which the Star-Telegram’s DFW.com first reported June 16. (Jhangiani declined to comment for this story.)

Mathews, 40, says he has no trepidation about coming into what might be an unsettled situation. “The sell for me was there’s a history, a track record,” Mathews said Thursday morning at a Magnolia Ave. coffee shop. “The Lone Star programs really well. It has a foundation of supporters that are really enthusiastic about film. The city of Fort Worth is a city that’s connected to the arts. For me, it was a no-brainer.”

He’s also not worried about continuing relationships with studios and distributors who might be concerned the festival is in disarray. “There are challenges but, again, I feel like this festival has a history and those connections have already been made,” he says.

The Film Society is sticking with its plans to host this year’s festival Nov. 5-8 at the AMC Palace in Sundance Square.

Acting and directing

The Texas-born Matthews, who graduated in 1997 with a degree in Radio-TV-Film from TCU, has spent much of his life in Central and South Texas in such towns as Fredericksburg and Victoria.

Earlier in his career, he pursued acting and filmmaking. His Internet Movie Database page lists roles in a variety of productions, from The Wanda Sykes Show to Profiler and Days of Our Lives. As a director, he has made three shorts, the most recent, Love Sick Lonnie, in 2014.

He has not attended the Lone Star but festival has submitted films, though none of them has been selected.

After living in Los Angeles, Mathews decided to return to Texas and ended up back in Fredericksburg, helping to launch the first Hill Country Film Festival in 2010.

“I loved going to film festivals. I wanted to start one there,” he says. “At first, it was just kind of a one-off. [But] it was so well-received that first year, we thought, ‘Let’s keep doing it.’”

That festival differs from Lone Star in that the bulk of its programming is short subjects rather than features. Also, he found that -- in the beginning, at least -- he had to be conservative in programming.

“We emphasized a lot of Texas film and a lot of family-oriented movies and that worked out really well,” he says. “As those audiences started to build, then you can add some things they weren’t expecting, like foreign films...We were concerned about subtitles, something as silly and funny as that.”

Bigger scale

He will have fewer of those concerns at Lone Star as well as a wider canvas. After all, the Hill Country festival attracted around 1,000 patrons, Lone Star can draw ten times that.

“What’s really cool and fascinating about Lone Star is that, yes, they put on a great film festival but...the year-round programming is what I’m interested in and the relationship with The Modern [Art Museum of Fort Worth],” he says, adding that community outreach is a priority.

Tina Gorski, auditorium program coordinator at The Modern, confirms the musuem is continuing with two upcoming Lone Star events.

Mathews’ own tastes in films run toward the small and personal. Two of his recent favorites are Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s Sundance winner Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and Alex Garland’s science-fiction tale Ex-Machina.

But he doesn’t yet know how he’s going to change or put his stamp on the festival though he said he’d like to “focus on this town we’re in...Fort Worth is such an interesting place, not only for filmmakers but for moviegoers,” he says. “I see this is as a destination film festival, much like Hill Country, but on a different scale.”

Cary Darling, 817 390-7571

Twitter: @carydar