Airport BLVD
Alejandro Hendricks · 2026 · 90 minutes
Nov. 14 · Regal 2 · 4:15 p.m.
Set in the transforming streets of East Austin, this jazz-infused musical follows Xavier as he watches his community, friendships, and sense of home disappear. As the city evolves around him, Airport BLVD becomes a soulful, romantic, and bittersweet love letter to a city old and new.
Programmer’s Note
Alejandro Hendricks grew up hearing stories about a place he’d never seen. His father and grandfather knew East Austin in the 1980s, when it was still a center of Black art and music, and by the time Hendricks moved there himself, little of what they’d described remained. So he started filming what was left. “This movie took five years of my life,” he told The Austin Chronicle, “and five years of that process was just me capturing that change.” Many of the locations in his debut feature have since closed or been bulldozed. Stars Cafe, a fixture for 58 years, came down recently for the expansion of I-35.
Xavier (Jamal Gamble), a photographer, comes home from a bruising stint in New York, crashes with his best friend Kenny (Kenny Duet), a DJ with one foot out the door, and goes looking for Destiny (Toluwani), the woman he fell for in some unspecified past, in an Austin that no longer exists. Hendricks cuts freely between then and now, and between Xavier’s story and documentary interviews with longtime residents, until memory and the present-day city begin to blur. Shot in black and white and scored with jazz—including a set by Michael Hale at the Continental Club, where Hendricks spent many a Monday night while writing—the film wears its debt to Stardust Memories (Woody Allen, 1980) openly, but its heart is closer to Killer of Sheep (1978), Charles Burnett’s masterpiece set in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, observed patiently, from the inside, by someone who lives there.
The heart and soul of Airport BLVD, though, is the Movie Star presence of its leads. Gamble and Toluwani have the dynamic, teasing chemistry every screen romance needs, and the easy, loving repartee between Gamble and Duet is itself a forceful argument that a city is its people more than its buildings. That’s as good a definition as any of “a sense of place,” one of the guiding principles of American regional cinema. At one point Hendricks asks muralist John Fisher, perched on scaffolding and listing everything Austin has lost, why he stays. “I guess I love Austin.”
Alejandro Hendricks and Brannin Webber will introduce and discuss the film.
Alejandro Hendricks defines himself as a Lo-Fi filmmaker with an acute focus on storytelling and creating moments that transcend entertainment and express emotion through serene composition, allowing an audience to surrender to the character and world around them. Often described as surreal, heartbreaking, suspenseful, and relatable, the stillness in Alejandro’s work takes an intimate approach, hooking you into a story that has blurred the lines between reality and entertainment.
Brannin Webber is a highly creative and detail-oriented director, video editor, and media manager with years of experience in the media production space. Exceptional skills in production, and post-production, combined with a BS in Computer Science from Rhodes College provides a unique perspective and approach to video production. Proven ability to work collaboratively with clients and efficiently manage multiple projects.