Rice students get to screen new film by alum Chris Eska and chat with him April 18

A group of Rice University undergraduate students will have the unique opportunity to view the Houston premiere of the new feature film “The Retrieval” with the film’s director, Rice alumnus Chris Eska ’98. “The Retrieval” tells the story of a young slave’s moral dilemma during the Civil War.

The premiere will be at 4 p.m. April 18 at Sundance Cinemas: Theatre Houston, 510 Texas Ave. The student group will be led by Brian Huberman, a Rice associate professor of visual and dramatic arts and filmmaker who taught Eska when he was a student at Rice. The free screening is open to all Rice students, staff and faculty. The tickets and a bus departing from the Rice Media Center at 3:30 p.m. are sponsored by Rice Public Art.

Eska, who lives in Los Angeles, and one of the film’s leading actors, Tishuan Scott, will be present for a Q&A session with the attendees following the screening.

According to the film’s press packet, “Retrieval” follows a fatherless 13-year-old boy sent to the North by his bounty hunter gang on a dangerous mission to retrieve a wanted man under false pretense. The boy is consumed by conflicting emotions as his relationship with the wanted man changes.

The Hollywood Reporter called the film “eloquently insightful, distinctive filmmaking” and “a skillfully wrought feature with appreciable emotional and historical resonance.”