Charles Horak

In 2016 Charles Horak built the film collective Rio Bravo Outpost, specializing in film production and post-production work in West Texas, where he consults on numerous film projects. In the last few years, Horak has been a producer on a variety of feature films, including Wim Wenders, Desperado (2020) as Associate Producer, selected for the Cannes Film Festival; Kevin Ford’s documentary The Pushback (2020) programmed at South by Southwest; the romantic comedy crime spree film First Date (2021) which premiered at Sundance; and Zach Passero’s hand-animated 2023 feature The Weird Kidz. He has also been developing, with his friend Lucky McKee, a film adaptation of McKee’s book I’m Not Sam and cowrote and produced Lucky’s cowboy creature horror short, They Once Had Horses (2019).

Horak is the director of the long-running monthly film screening series, The Film Salon, and longtime host of the radio program, On Film (KTEP, NPR El Paso). He is a voting member of the Critics Choice Association and a board member of the Texas Archive of the Moving Image. In the world of film preservation, Horak has helped produce numerous restorations of Mexican films with the Permanencia Voluntaria Film Archive, located in Tepotzlán, Mexico, and he is a member of the Association of Moving Image Archivists. Horak is the cofounder and former artistic director of one of the largest classic film festivals in the world, the Plaza Classic Film Festival in El Paso, Texas.

When he is not engaged in with various cinema projects, he is an architect and runs several family-owned real estate development companies.