“Houston is a place that easily allows for long moments of introspection in the midst of apparent frenzy, sudden joy side by side with disappointment. We sought to capture those authentic moments when our selves come face to face with this city’s unexpected beauty. Such moments can be naturally elongated, which seems a reflection of Houston’s peculiar two-sidedness: “crawl,” in the words of the poem, or the flowers in the film that might perhaps have grown on a site of demolition. For both Bryce and Anis, the idea was to access the city’s contradictions without imputing that movement forward has to oppose circularity, or that individualist expression has to succumb to estrangement.”

Anis Shivani is the author of numerous critically-acclaimed books of poetry, fiction, and criticism, including, most recently, Logography: A Poetry Omnibus, Confessions: Poems, The Moon Blooms in Occupied Hours: Poems, Soraya: Sonnets, Karachi Raj: A Novel, and A History of the Cat in Nine Chapters or Less: A Novel. His work appears widely in leading literary journals such as Georgia Review, Yale Review, Boston Review, Threepenny Review, Antioch Review, AGNI, Fence, Boulevard, Subtropics, and many others, and in newspapers and magazines around the country. He has just finished writing a novel of the Mughal empire in sixteenth-century India. Anis is the winner of a Pushcart Prize, and a graduate of Harvard College

Bryce Saucier is a cinematographer born and based in Houston, Texas. He found a passion for film through making skateboarding videos with his friends and has since worked as a cinematographer on short films, music videos, art installations, commercials and documentaries.