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When Steele approached one of the producers of “Computer Chess” at a film festival earlier this year, the producer agreed to bring the film to Oak Cliff on the spot.

The film festival team is composed of the theater’s management group, Aviation Cinemas, and volunteers. Over the past year, they collectively have attended dozens of film festivals and screened thousands of movies to arrive at the 70 or so films at this year’s festival.

Another film with a Texas connection is Robert Altman’s “McCabe and Mrs. Miller.” Filmmaker and Fort Worth native David Lowery will present that film, along with another flick, which the festival cannot name because it is playing at another festival. Epstein will say that it has a 95-minute runtime and that “it’s a film that our audience desperately wants to see. It’s a fairly high-profile film.”

One of the hits of last year’s festival was a screening of the silent film “Sunrise” with a live score by Austin-based band Montopolis. This year’s counterpart is a screening of silent short films called “Shadow of the BatMan,” which are thought to have inspired the Batman comic books. An eight-piece orchestra, Two Star Symphony, will perform the score along with the film Saturday night.

In smaller festivals like this one, it isn’t complicated to see most of the films offered. At Sundance and SXSW, for example, there are so many films that it is impossible to see them all, Steele says.

“We’re finding new things, but we’re also curating what’s been curated,” he says.

One example is “Medora,” a documentary about a small-town basketball team in Indiana on a quest to win a single game after a run of 44 straight losses. The film’s director, Davy Rothbart, describes it as “ ‘Gummo’ meets ‘Hoop Dreams.’ ” It screened at SXSW, but Steele says, “No one has seen it.”

“It’s going to be a sleeper hit,” he says.

A film making its Texas premiere is “Persistence of Vision,” a 2012 documentary about animator Richard Williams’ nearly 30-year quest to produce a masterpiece. Williams was nominated for an Academy Award for his work on “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” a job he took to finance his own film.