A new documentary about the aftermath of last summer’s devastating floods and the effort to restore the Guadalupe River premiered Thursday, May 14, at Arcadia Live Theatre, drawing an audience of landowners, conservationists, elected officials and community members from across the Hill Country.
“Hope for the Guadalupe,” directed by Ben Masters and produced by Josh Winkler, follows biologists, landowners and conservationists working to restore the river through native planting, seed distribution and long-term stewardship following the July 4, 2025, flood.
Masters said the project grew from a personal connection to the river and a sense of duty to document the recovery.
“We’re cinematographers,” Masters said. “It’s kind of our duty to document this moment in history while we were trying to help our friends and our family get their feet back under them.”
What started as a request for a three-minute Facebook video from the Kerr County River Foundation became a 25-minute film, finished just days before the premiere.
“To go from deciding to make a film to having it be in theaters in four-and-a-half months is pretty unheard of,” Masters said.
A panel discussion followed the screening, featuring filmmakers, conservationists and community members. Katharine Romans, executive director of the Hill Country Alliance, moderated.
“The Guadalupe River is central to the identity, ecology and future of the Hill Country,” Romans said. “This film captures both the scale of the disaster and the extraordinary collaboration underway to restore the river corridor for the people, wildlife and communities that depend on it.”
Central to the film is a large-scale tree-planting effort led by Michael Eason, vice president of conservation at the San Antonio Botanical Garden. Eason said the Trees Initiative, which aims to plant 50,000 trees along the most affected stretches of the river corridor, is rooted in conservation best practices.
“We’re not landscaping,” Eason said. “We’re mimicking nature. We’re planting highly dense areas, and those are going to be more resilient with more density and diversity.”
Eason said seed collection ran from early October through late November or early December, yielding more than 850,000 seeds from the Hill Country watersheds. He estimated roughly 30,000 trees will be ready to plant this Fall, with another 30,000 targeted for the following year.
Rebecca Gibson, a Hill Country Alliance regional engagement manager whose first day on the job was July 1, four days before the floods, said the group recently wrapped its seed broadcasting season.
“We distributed 6,800 pounds of seeds,” Gibson said, adding that a first plant distribution of approximately 15,000 plants is also underway.
Steve Nelle, a retired Natural Resources Conservation Service wildlife biologist featured prominently in the film, urged landowners to take a long view of recovery.
“Not only will the river heal, but it can be better than it was before the flood,” Nelle said. “Landowners can either help or hinder that recovery process by how they manage their individual properties.”
Nelle also cautioned against removing what many consider debris from the floodplain, saying large logs and woody material play a critical role in slowing water and reinforcing riverbanks.
The Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country is a key supporter of both the film and an ongoing Hope for the Guadalupe Fund. CEO Austin Dickson said the foundation has committed $14 million to environmental grant-making as part of its disaster recovery response, an approach he described as treating environmental loss on equal footing with the loss of homes and businesses.
“We’ve lost family members, we’ve lost homes, we’ve lost businesses, but we’ve also lost tree canopy, we’ve lost habitat, and the river is a part of that story of loss,” Dickson said.
Jeremy Walther, one of the founding visionaries of the Kerr County River Foundation, said his organization formed to sustain the community’s long-term commitment to the watershed.
“The watershed is our identity. It’s our economic pump,” Walther said. “It is our origin story as a community, and it’s the origin story of thousands of years of communities that were here before us.”
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