Local film educators say San Antonio needs more skilled film production workers, and the Borrego brothers are ready to step up.
James Borrego, brother of actor Jesse Borrego, coordinates the radio, television and film program at San Antonio College (SAC). Together, the siblings have worked to establish a new film certificate program that will train students to make films and bolster the city’s young filmmaking scene.
The first cohort of the new program produced a film accepted by this year’s CineFestival at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center.
“That was the first time that any students at SAC had been able to get a film into a film festival,” James Borrego said.
Apache was produced by 10 students in the film production class Borrego taught during the spring semester. The 10-minute short film tells the story of a West Sider struggling to change his unlawful ways, recalling the 1993 Blood In, Blood Out Hollywood movie that launched Jesse Borrego’s acting career.
Jesse Borrego, who joined the program’s advisory committee last year, said the point of the new certificate program is to train students to get jobs in the film industry, “so they can become part of that creative workforce.”
He said the next step is to establish an associate’s degree for the program, which his brother hopes will be in place by the fall 2024 semester.
James Borrego said his student Antonio Graviel Gonzales will be the first to complete the certificate program after he takes a lighting class in the fall. Watching Gonzales on the CineFestival stage talking about the process of making Apache with fellow students “was a pretty big moment for all of us, just to see that we’ve come that far, as a proof of concept for this program … And now the next step is to solidify that as and make it a degree [program],” Borrego said.
Borrego has decades of experience in film production. After graduating from the University of Texas, he moved to Los Angeles because there were no jobs in Austin or San Antonio at the time. Still, he maintained his local connections by working on “probably every major film in the last 20 years that’s come through San Antonio,” he said, including Selena, All the Pretty Horses and The Newton Boys.
The Austin film scene was once similar to San Antonio’s, he said, with few productions and few skilled workers, until filmmakers such as Richard Linklater and Robert Rodriguez hit it big in the early 1990s with films such as Slacker, Dazed and Confused and El Mariachi.
With film production programs popping up in area schools, including the new University of Texas at San Antonio baccalaureate program, Borrego surmised that San Antonio could become the new Austin within two decades.
He said it will take a combined effort by area schools and city leadership to keep lobbying for film incentives that can make San Antonio an attractive location for filmmakers and producers.
During a recent meeting of the San Antonio Arts Commission’s Performing Arts, Film and Music Committee, Film Commissioner and Music Program Manager Kim LeBlanc announced that “San Antonio has the most competitive film incentives in Texas.”
LeBlanc said during its recent session, the Texas Legislature made a historic funding allocation of $200 million for the state’s film incentive program, with larger productions saving as much as 22.5% of their overall budgets. Paired with San Antonio’s 7.5% film incentives, which makes the city “as competitive as our neighbor [cities] or anywhere else,” she said.
“We’re really excited to see that the state legislature has been able to acknowledge the value of the impact of the film and media production industries, and make this kind of investment,” LeBlanc said.
As far as Borrego’s belief that the support of city leadership is necessary to make San Antonio a viable film city for its film education program graduates, LeBlanc appears to be listening.
“We really have a moment to seize, and it’s our job now to make the most of this investment from the legislature,” she said.
