Special Guests

Charles Horak's experience includes being a radio host of the weekly radio program On Film and co-founder of the Plaza Classic Film Festival just to name a few.

Charles Horak’s family tree has grown in the El Paso borderland for six generations.

Horak is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin (B. Arch., 89), and he is an Architect, Developer and owner of numerous enterprises under the banner of Horak Companies, Inc. For almost thirty years Horak has managed real estate financing, design, construction and property management for various Federal agencies and he manages a portfolio of properties which includes retail, industrial, postal, medical, service and government-use buildings.

Charles Horak has pursued numerous personal interests. He has been the past chair of the Director’s Circle of the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts, has curated five exhibitions at the El Paso Museum of Art and thanks to a lifelong love of cinema, Horak has found numerous ways to share his love of film with others. He is the director of the monthly film screening series, The Film Salon, and host of the long-running local NPR radio program, On Film. He is a voting member of the Critics Choice Association and board member of the Texas Archive of the Moving Image. In the world of film preservation Horak has produced numerous restorations of important Mexican films with the Permanencia Voluntaria Film Archive (located in Tepotzlán, Mexico) and he is a member of the international Association of Moving Image Archivists. Horak is the co-founder and former artistic director of one of the largest classic film festivals in the world, the Plaza Classic Film Festival in El Paso, Texas, and advisor to the El Paso Film Festival and Femme Frontera.

In 2016, Horak built the film collective, Rio Bravo Outpost, a collaborative creative hub specializing in film production and post-production work in West Texas where he consults on numerous film projects. In the last few years, he has been a producer on a number of feature films, including Wim Wenders Desperado (2020 Cannes, as Associate Producer), Kevin Ford’s documentary The Pushback (2020 SXSW), the romantic comedy crime spree film First Date (2021 Sundance), and Zach Passero’s hand-animated 2023 feature, The Weird Kidz. Horak has several film projects in development with his friend writer/director Lucky McKee.