Filmmaker James Ivory and Tony-winning theater director Julie Taymor will be featured guests at the 2014 Houston Cinema Arts Festival, which runs Nov. 12-16.

Ivory - whose films include "Howard's End," "Remains of the Day" and "A Room With a View" - will receive the festival's Levantine Cinema Arts Award. His movies "City of Your Final Destination," "Mr. and Mrs. Bridge" and "Remains of the Day" will also screen at the festival.

Taymor will be on hand for the event's opening night, when a film of her staging of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" will be shown. Alley Theatre artistic director Greg Boyd will moderate a conversation with Taymor.

The festival includes 50 programs in five days, plus eight films that screen during the four-day Spotlight on Texas program after the festival.

"One of the most distinctive qualities of this film festival is it's not just film. It's a cinema arts festival, and we focus on film in relation to all the other arts," Richard Herskowitz, the event's artistic director, said at a kick-off event Tuesday night at the Sam Houston Hotel. "Every year we have live cinema performances, in which cinema interacts with other art forms."

Among the festival's presentations this year will be screenings of "Wild," the Reese Witherspoon drama based on Cheryl Strayed's best-selling book; "The Sound and the Fury," an adaptation of William Faulkner's classic directed by and starring James Franco; and "The Imitation Game," in which Benedict Cumberbatch plays British mathematician Alan Turing.

Films with local connections include "One Armed Man," High School for Performing and Visual Arts alum Tim Guinee's adaptation of a play by the late Horton Foote, a Wharton native (and Guinee's father-in-law). "Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People" will screen at the Eldorado Ballroom, where filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris will collect and project photographs from audience members for a program called "Third Ward Stories."

Films will be screened on the outdoor patio of Cafe Brasil this year, as well as in the Brandon Gallery next door (formerly Domi Books). Other venues include the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Sundance Cinema; and the Aurora Picture Show.

More information is available at cinemartsociety.org.