Last October, Kaytie Nielsen and Iris Beaumier hit the road in a Chrysler Pacifica minivan. The best friends met in college and, despite being from different parts of the world, bonded over a shared love of storytelling. Beaumier, who grew up in New York, enjoyed performing in front of the camera, while Nielsen, a native of Fort Worth, liked writing and directing. Thirteen years later, their mutual interest brought them to this point: driving down a highway to bring a little touring film festival they created to places like Flatonia, McAllen, Mineola, and Sweetwater.
In 2025, the first Big Texas Little Film Tour traveled to eight communities around the state, screening at rodeos, honky-tonks, independent theaters, and even barns. The lineup featured seven Texas-made short films from emerging Texan filmmakers, and at each stop, they added an eighth film by a local director.
Beginning Oct. 9, the duo returns for the second installment. This time, the Big Texas Little Film Tour kicks off in Borger and ends in Lockhart on Nov. 7, with stops in Dallas, Houston, Austin, Laredo, Eagle Pass, and Terlingua. The two filmmakers hope embarking on an epic Texas road trip, driving over 2,000 miles, will spark conversations and create community everywhere they go.
This year’s selection of shorts includes Austin filmmaker Bita Ghassemi’s Firewall, about an Iranian-American girl in Texas trying to contact her father in politically unstable Iran and Ballelujah, by Plano’s Ori Matisse Evans, depicting an epic playground basketball game against Bible salesmen. There’s also Tito Ritmo by El Paso native Ulises Córdova about a zoot suit-donning mechanic who enters a dance marathon in order to win a new car.
The genesis for the tour came from a simple goal. In 2025, Nielsen made a short film with her brother, Nick Nielsen. Beaumier served as producer. Called Sweetwater, Texas, the film was based on Nielsen’s family and her great-great-uncle, Bill Ransberger, who started the Sweetwater Rattlesnake Roundup. Nielsen wanted her film to reach a wider audience not necessarily found at most film festivals.
“I felt like the existing infrastructures of film festivals tend to be a little exclusive,” says Nielsen, who splits her time between Berlin and Fort Worth. She wondered how they could invite a broader Texas audience to see their film. “Maybe instead of trying to get them to come to us,” she says, “we go to them.”
The motivation grew from one film to a block of shorts representing various content, styles, and regions of Texas. From there, it snowballed into a greater idea about what it is to be a Texas filmmaker.
Nielsen and Beaumier agree that they could not have pulled off the tour if it weren’t for the community partners they tapped to help them find the venues and the audiences. One of those partners was Rodrigo Gomez of the East Texas Film Society in Tyler. He played a key role in organizing the Mineola screening at the Lake Country Playhouse.
“What really made it special for me [was] speaking to people [who were] passionate about being artistic who felt that they would never meet people who were on the same page as them,” he says, “[and] offering that space to be creative.”
Another community partner, Heidi Hovda, who describes herself as a “creative community advocate in Corpus Christi” is involved in Film Up, an open film night series at the local Alamo Drafthouse. She says she was tickled by people experiencing their first short film. “One person said, ‘Where can I find short films? I didn’t even think I’d like a short film before,’” she says.
In the meantime, the friends still refer to their tour as a ragtag band moving across the state, and they still rely on the minivan. They look forward to more community partners, more unique venues, more stimulating conversations at the Q&A’s, and more shorts to introduce to a variety of Texans.
“There are all these little stars of Texas,” Nielsen says. “They are the stars of the constellation and we think of ourselves as the [connecting line] that makes the bigger picture.”
