Published: March 22, 2026 | By texas.film
Annie Silverstein makes films about people the industry doesn't usually bother with. A teenager on the outskirts of Houston on a path toward the same prison that already claimed her mother. An aging bullfighter trying to hold on. Kids on reservations in Washington State. She spent ten years as a youth worker before she went to film school, and you can feel every one of those years in every frame she makes.
She is one of the best filmmakers working in Texas. Bull went to Cannes Un Certain Regard in 2019. It is a masterwork of social realism, quietly devastating, shot in and around Houston on zero pretense. She is the filmmaker the Texas film ecosystem should be building toward, and who has been here the whole time.
The Basics
Annie Silverstein — born in Oakland, California. BA in American History from Macalester College. Co-founded Longhouse Media in 2004, an indigenous media arts nonprofit in Seattle. Fulbright scholar (2007) — taught filmmaking and media literacy at an orphanage for teenage boys in Rio de Janeiro. MFA in Film Production from the University of Texas at Austin (2013). Based in Austin. Lecturer at UT Austin.
AFS Grant alumna.
Filmmaker Magazine's 25 New Faces of Indie Film, 2014.
Ten Years Before Film School
This is the most important thing to understand about Annie Silverstein: she didn't come to filmmaking the normal way. She spent a decade as a youth worker and media educator before she ever enrolled in an MFA program. Her work with Native youth in Washington State, her Fulbright in Brazil, her co-founding of Longhouse Media — all of it predates her first short film.
She cites those ten years as her greatest influence. You can see why. Her films are not made by someone who studied how to depict poverty and marginalized communities. They're made by someone who spent a decade in those communities, teaching kids to use cameras as tools for inquiry and self-expression.
That background produces a specific kind of film. Character-driven. Observational. Grounded in specific places. Suspicious of sentimentality. The camera doesn't condescend to its subjects. The subjects have dignity the narrative doesn't need to manufacture.
The Shorts: A Career Ladder at Cannes
Noc na Tanečku: Night at the Dance (2011) — documentary short; SXSW 2011 premiere.
Spark (2012) — fiction short; SXSW 2012.
Skunk (2014) — fiction short; Cannes Film Festival Cinéfondation 2014. Won the first-place jury award, presided over by Abbas Kiarostami. That's not a footnote — Kiarostami is one of the great filmmakers of the 20th century, and his jury gave Silverstein's short the top prize. This is when the industry started paying close attention.
Three shorts. Each one a step. Each one at a major festival. None of them made to be seen and forgotten.
Bull (2019)
The film.
Logline: Kris, a headstrong teenager from the outskirts of Houston, is destined to follow her mother to the state penitentiary — until she's forced to work for her neighbor Abe, an aging bullfighter struggling to hold his place in the rodeo circuit. Two people at the end of their rope, finding an unlikely bond.
Development: Selected for the 2016 Sundance Screenwriters Lab and Directors Lab. Three years from Sundance labs to Cannes premiere.
Premiere: 2019 Cannes Film Festival — Un Certain Regard section. The most significant non-competition section at the most important film festival in the world.
Deauville American Film Festival: Grand Prize + Revelation Prize + Critics' Prize. Three awards.
US premiere: Film Independent's New Wave, 2019. SXSW 2020 (Festival Favorites section).
Distribution: Samuel Goldwyn Films (domestic); Sony Pictures Worldwide (international).
Setting: The outskirts of Houston. The rodeo circuit. Texas landscape as character — not scenic Texas, not Austin hipster Texas, but the flat, working-class edge of the city where people live and struggle with limited options.
Co-written with: Johnny McAllister (Silverstein's husband and frequent collaborator).
What Makes the Films Work
A few consistent elements across Silverstein's work:
Non-professional or non-traditional casting. She finds people who have a lived relationship with the material. This isn't a gimmick — it's a commitment to authenticity that shapes every performance in the film.
Location as character. Bull could only be set where it's set. The specific geography of working-class Houston suburbs and the Texas rodeo circuit is not backdrop — it is the world the film inhabits and cannot exist without.
Social realism without despair. The characters in Bull are in hard situations. The film does not pretend otherwise. But it also refuses the easy move of making their suffering the point. Kris and Abe both try to right their paths. The film is interested in the trying.
Youth as subject. From her years as a youth worker through her shorts through Bull, Silverstein returns consistently to young people on the margins — what shapes them, what traps them, what they find to hold onto.
Texas Roots
Silverstein came to Texas for graduate school and stayed. She's been at UT Austin — first as a student, then as a lecturer — for over a decade. Her feature debut is set in Houston. She's embedded in the Austin film ecosystem in the way that matters: not just as a filmmaker passing through, but as someone teaching the next generation of Texas filmmakers at UT while making her own work.
The AFS grant supported her early career. Berlinale Talents alumni. The full international circuit — but grounded in Austin.
What's Next
No announced next project as of early 2026. After Bull's extended festival run (2019–2020), the pandemic interrupted a lot of development. Watch this space.
Whatever she makes next will be worth seeing. She is one of those filmmakers who takes a long time between projects because she takes the work seriously. The gap between Skunk (2014) and Bull (2019) was five years of labs, development, and deliberate craft. She doesn't rush.
texas.film covers working Texas filmmakers. Profile series: Channing Godfrey Peoples | David Lowery | The Zellner Brothers | Macon Blair | Greg Kwedar & Clint Bentley | Annie Silverstein.