If you have spent any time thinking about how a city is actually put together, tonight is the night to see it on screen. The Better Cities Film Festival lands at AFS Cinema this evening, Wednesday, July 22, for a curated program of documentaries and shorts all focused on urbanism and city life. It is the kind of evening that pulls together architecture, sustainability, and the future of where we live, and it is put on by two groups that live and breathe those subjects.
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The evening is built around two parts. Networking kicks off at 6:00 PM, which is the real draw if you want to meet the people who shape Austin's built environment, and the screening follows at 7:00 PM. Tickets are $20, and the whole thing runs until about 9:00 PM. It is all ages, so it works as much for a curious family as for a room full of planners.
The organizers are the ones who make the subject matter stick. The AIA Austin Urban Design Committee and the Congress for the New Urbanism Central Texas Chapter are the names behind the event. AIA Austin's committee works to improve the urban environment through design, planning, and public policy, and its meetings run on the fourth Wednesday of every month. CNU-CTX, meanwhile, covers the Austin and San Antonio metroplexes and the surrounding counties, bringing together experts and communities to build more livable places in Central Texas, with its work guided by the Charter for the New Urbanism. A few local firms have put their weight behind the night as well: RVI Planning + Landscape Architecture is the networking sponsor, and McCann Adams Studio, Civilitude, HNTB, and Steinberg Hart are on as committee sponsors.
As for the films, the Better Cities Film Festival is a traveling program that curates the best work on making cities, towns, and neighborhoods better, with a particular eye on short films about urban life and a human-centered public realm. It is a four-day festival at its core, and the platform it uses to gather films — Film Freeway — takes submissions across all genres and lengths, so the selection tends to be broad rather than narrow.
The venue is worth a mention on its own. AFS Cinema is a newly renovated two-screen art house run by the Austin Film Society, about five miles from downtown, with a 4,675-square-foot event hall and a lobby bar that makes the pre-screening hour easy. Both theaters are equipped with Dolby Sound, which is a nice touch for a program that relies as much on atmosphere as on information.
If you have ever walked a block in Austin and wondered why it feels the way it does, or if you just want to see how other cities are solving the same problems, this is a low-stakes way to spend a Wednesday evening. Grab a ticket, show up for the networking hour, and leave with a few new ways of looking at the streets you walk every day.
Published Date
22 July 2026
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