Nirvana, Igor Volshin’s story of two women trying to rescue their junkie friend in St. Petersburg, Russia, was named the winner of the Narrative Feature Competition on Sunday for the second Lone Star International Film Festival.

It joins The New Year Parade (Special Jury Prize), Visual Acoustics (Documentary Feature Competition), The Banishment (Best Foreign Language Feature), Dallas filmmaker Clay Liford’s My Mom Smokes Weed (Short Competition) and Sugar (Special Jury Prize) as award winners at this year’s festival.

Before a Saturday screening of Trindad that I attended, festival director Dennis Bishop talked passionately about the need for an art house theater in Fort Worth. As it stands now, if you live in Fort Worth and want to see these films, you either have to drive to Dallas to the Angelika Film Center, Magnolia Theatre or Inwood Theatre or Plano to the Angelika up there. or you can go to the Magnolia at the Modern series and catch the film the one weekend it plays there.

Either way, it’s not real convenient for Fort Worth filmgoers, and I get the sense that one of the driving forces behind Lone Star is the desire to show that there is an interest in independent film in Fort Worth. Whether or not the festival accomplished that this weekend is hard for me to say — I wasn’t able to attend every screening to check on attendance. But it seems logical that the more successful the festival becomes, the greater the chances of an art house theater winding up in Tarrant County one day.