Nevada County Picayune and Gurdon Times Newspaper Archive

Film Festival Given Grant

The Hot Springs Documentary Film Institute has been awarded a grant of $175,000 from the Horace C. Cabe Foundation of Gurdon to purchase the historic Malco Theater.

The institute presently rents, with an option to purchase, the theater and its adjacent buildings for its headquarters.

The institute's premier event is the internationally acclaimed Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival held each October. It attracts documentary film makers from around the world who show their films during the ten-day festival.

The Malco Theater, located at 817 Central Avenue, has been the site of operations for all film showings over the past several years.

Jerry Tanenbaum, chairman of the film institute, is quoted as saying, "The Cabe Foundation grant is the first step in the master plan which will proceed to completely renovate the 70-year-old structure. The state of the art new building, rebuilt to its original art-Deco, art- modern splendor, will include five theaters, administrative offices and classroom, archival and other related usage."

David Glasser, who holds the Stephen L. Anderson chair in architecture and urban studies at the University of Arkansas, has been retained to design and oversee the total renovation.

The Horace C. Cabe Foundation was founded in 1993 and funded by the estate of the late Cabe who was one of the leaders of forest products industry in southwestern Arkansas. Cabe graduated form Southern Methodist University and Harvard Business School and worked briefly at the Chase National Bank in New York before returning to his home state of Arkansas to begin his career in the lumber industry.

Cabe was a leader in reforestation and other land resource management practices which are now standard industry practice. His sister and brothers joined him and together they built the Gurdon Lumber Company into one of the largest family-owned businesses in the state.

The Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival is supported in part by a grant from the Arkansas Humanities Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities; The National Endowment for the Arts; and the Arkansas Arts Council, an agency of the department of Arkansas Heritage.

For additional information, contact Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival at (501) 321- 4747, or access its website at www.DocuFilmInst.org