There’s a moment in Airport BLVD, the debut feature film from Austin filmmaker Alejandro Hendricks, in which artist John Fisher perches on scaffolding in front of his mural titled Voyage to Soulsville on the wall of the George Washington Carver Museum & Cultural Center. Fisher lists all the ways in which the city has changed, especially for Black people, and Hendricks asks him, very simply, why does he stay? Fisher’s response is equally simple. “I guess I love Austin.”
This exchange crystalizes the themes of hybrid docudrama Airport BLVD. Through both documentary interview inserts and the narrative story of Xavier (Jamal Gamble), Hendricks captures a city in constant flux, a place where people are always asking themselves: Have I outgrown Austin, or has Austin outgrown me? Hendricks said, “This movie took five years of my life, and five years of that process was just me capturing that change.”
Tonight, Airport BLVD debuts at New York’s Tribeca Festival, and no one is more surprised than Hendricks. He’s literally only been to one other film festival – the 2023 Austin Spotlight Film Festival for his short, “The Outskirts of Time,” for which Gamble won best actor. Now he’s on his second ever trip to NYC with his first feature, which was not only been selected for Tribeca but has been selected for the prestigious competition segment. “It’s definitely wild, definitely surreal,” he said. Luckily, he added, he has a mentor in Bryan Poyser, a filmmaking veteran who was at Tribeca last year with his own film, Leads. “He’s incredible, he’s been super-supportive, and he’s been helping me navigate some of the unknowability of this whole thing.”
Dealing with unpredictability and change has always been part of Hendricks’ own relationship with Austin. His parents lived in East Austin in the Eighties “and they would tell me all these stories, and when I moved here I came with that knowledge of this Austin in the Eighties. To not find anything, outside of the jazz halls in Austin, that was very shocking.”
With all the changes, why does Hendricks stay? In part, it’s because he sees Austin as ground zero for the next wave of independent cinema. “The next wave of indie film is going to come through Austin, Texas. With the incredible work being made and so many filmmakers that are showing their films, making their films, this is an incredible place for filmmaking right now.”
Yet Old Austin still exists within New Austin. During filming, he was also working with Family Eldercare and so he got to know and interview a lot of long-term residents of the city, who have born witness to decades of change. “I find that in spite of all these changes there is a vibrant community in Austin, and it’s still here, and they’re still trying to find their way, and that should be celebrated just as much as the negativity that comes with gentrification and displacement.”
That’s why the stories within Airport BLVD aren’t simple reminiscences of days gone past. Hendricks said he was profoundly influenced during filming by reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me “and I resonated very deeply with the passage where he talks about what his grandparents said to him, that you have to find your way to live within the all of this world.”
Indeed, to love Austin is to embrace a city that has always been changing and growing, doubling in size every two decades since the year it was founded. Returning from New York to his hometown, Xavier must ponder his own relationship with the city, and whether he’s chasing a ghost of what it briefly was. “That’s such a connective tissue of the city,” Hendricks said. “People who’ve lived there even two years or a year, everyone has a story of something disappearing or not being what it was before.”
Taking his very Austin film to New York actually closes a certain creative loop for Airport BLVD, as one of the key influences on the style and the script is a classic of New York introspection and melancholy, 1980’s Stardust Memories. “When I first started writing screenplays, that was a script that I would read to study,” Hendricks said. “The feeling is very similar, both in those movies and in the sentiment of people that I’ve met in Austin – very melancholic and reflective.”
One other element that Airport BLVD shares with Stardust Memories is the use of jazz in the score and as a narrative element. Hendricks said, “This is a love story about learning to love the place that you’re in and the people that are around you, just as much as it is about the unpredictability of it all, and I think jazz fits right in between that, especially when you think about the solo and the freestyle of it all.”
It also doesn’t hurt that Hendricks is a massive jazz fan. While writing Airport BLVD, he said, “I literally used to go watch Michael Hale at the Continental Club on Monday nights at 11pm, upstairs above the tattoo parlor.” One of those performances is part of Airport BLVD, one of many moments that allows Hendricks to celebrate and spotlight a component of Austin’s music scene that is often drowned out by twang and distortion of its country and rock cousins. “There are so many incredible places and incredible musicians. Pamela Hart, Mac McIntosh, Michael Mordecai at the Elephant Room. It’s a vibrant community that knows so much about this city.”
Airport BLVD receives its world premiere at the Tribeca Festival Friday, June 5, 6:15pm, at Village East by Angelika. There will be additional screenings Saturday, June 6 at 8:45pm and Wednesday, June 10 at 9:15pm at the AMC 19th St. East 6. Tickets and info at tribecafilm.com.
