CinéShow’s 2026 awards luncheon, held 25 August in Dallas, handed out three honors: a first-ever Exhibitor Marketing of the Year Award to Cinergy Entertainment, an inaugural Byron Berkley Leadership Award to Cinema United‘s Todd Halstead, and the Frank Liberto Award to Flix Brewhouse founder Allan Reagan.

All three are worth exhibitors’ attention. But it was Reagan’s acceptance speech — which veered almost immediately away from beer, box office and the usual industry thank-yous toward bombed-out cinemas and Ukrainian orphans — that left the room quiet in a way awards luncheons rarely do.

Cinergy and Halstead Take Home Inaugural Honors
Cinergy, the Dallas-based dine-in cinema and entertainment chain, picked up CinéShow’s first-ever marketing award for a five-person team led by Chief Marketing Officer Traci Hanlon and including Sydney Cruz, Jordan Michael, Elizabeth Ramirez and Melanie Yang.

The group has made a specialty of turning relatively small opportunities into outsized attention. A stolen Brad Pitt “F1” standee at Cinergy’s Odessa location became a “Where’s Brad?” social campaign that generated local news coverage, while a “The Devil Wears Prada 2” couture night and Prada bag giveaway became one of the year’s stronger promotional tie-ins.

It’s a reminder that as studios have thinned their own marketing ranks, the creative burden — and the audience-building payoff — has shifted further onto exhibitors themselves.

Halstead, Cinema United’s director of government relations and independent theatre owner engagement, received the inaugural Byron Berkley Leadership Award, named for the retired theatre owner and longtime industry leader who served as president of NATO of Texas, was instrumental in forming Theatre Owners of Mid-America — now Cinema United of Mid-America — was a founding board member of the Independent Cinema Alliance and played an important role in CinéShow’s growth.

The award recognized Halstead’s own contributions to the exhibition community, including helping launch CinéShow, building the regional organization that became Cinema United of Mid-America and, more recently, spearheading Cinema United’s Independent Theatre Owners Coalition.

Accepting the first award ever given in Berkley’s name, Halstead couldn’t resist a bit of humor before turning sincere.

“I’m humbled by this award, but that humbleness will pass,” he told the room.

He then said the honor meant so much “because of the name that’s on it.”

A beat.

“Mine.”

Eventually, Halstead got to the other name on the award, describing Berkley as a mentor and industry leader who taught him that leadership “isn’t just about being the loudest or taking credit. It’s about listening, giving people the opportunity to contribute, to grow, being collaborative, and keeping everyone focused on the goal.”

From a Bombed Threeplex in Irpin to a Rebuilt Shopping Mall
Then Reagan took the stage, and the room’s temperature changed.

The 72-year-old founder of Flix Brewhouse — who stepped down as CEO in 2022 but remains the company’s founder and executive chair, with Chance Robertson now running the 15-location, six-state chain — used most of his remarks not to talk about the dine-in cinema business he built, but about a small three-screen cinema in Ukraine he’d never set foot in before it was destroyed.

The theater, called Perun Cinema after the Slavic god of thunder and lightning, had opened in August 2018 inside the Giraffe Mall in Irpin, a Kyiv suburb of roughly 65,000 people. Russian forces destroyed much of the mall during the Battle of Irpin in the opening weeks of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which began in February 2022.

Searching for cinemas damaged in the invasion, Reagan tracked down Perun’s owners, who weren’t interested in rebuilding. They pointed him instead to the mall’s owners, who were.

“How could a middle-aged guy from a cinema chain known for brewing beer come and help?” he recalled asking himself.

Showing the CinéShow audience an image of the devastated property, Reagan didn’t soften the description. “This is what happens when war comes and visits you in your shopping center.”

What followed became, by Reagan’s account, Irpin’s first unsubsidized foreign commercial investment after the invasion — a loan with equity participation, done at deliberately favorable terms. “I didn’t do this to make money,” he said. The rebuilt Giraffe Mall reopened 20 December 2024, anchored by Silpo, Ukraine’s second-largest grocery chain, alongside JYSK, Comfy, Sinsay and EVA, and equipped with a backup generator and basement air raid shelter — requirements that change the operating calculus in ways American exhibitors rarely have to contemplate.

“We used to have guests squeamish that they might catch something bad from COVID if they go to the movies,” Reagan said. “Well, how about catching something coming through the roof that you didn’t expect?”

Reagan says the mall is now essentially fully occupied. A phase two, including a roughly 35,000-square-foot dine-in theater, is sketched out and waiting on a durable peace before construction starts.

It’s worth sitting with how unusual that sequence is for exhibition: a U.S. dine-in cinema operator becoming, almost by accident, the financing partner behind a foreign shopping center’s reconstruction in an active war zone — because a threeplex he initially set out to save couldn’t be saved, and he chose not to walk away. “Movie theaters do a whole lot more than show films,” Reagan said. “They create places where communities gather and lives can change.”

The Flixmobiles
Reagan’s second thread involved a documentary, “No Sleep Till Kyiv,” which Flix screened as part of a string of Ukraine-themed fundraiser nights — eight titles in total across Flix’s Round Rock, San Antonio, Frisco and Oklahoma City locations over three years — raising money for the Texas- and Kyiv-based Liberty Ukraine Foundation.

The film follows volunteers who source and prepare pickup trucks in Tallinn, Estonia, then drive them roughly 30 hours across Europe to Kyiv before handing the keys over to Ukrainian military units.

Reagan prescreened the documentary at home and came away convinced he could make the journey himself.

His wife was less enthusiastic. “You’re flipping crazy,” Reagan recalled her telling him.

He went anyway.

Reagan has since made the run twice — first in July 2025 and again this past May — as part of four total trips to Ukraine since 2023, totaling roughly 50 days on the ground.

The broader Help99 program typically moves 25 to 30 vehicles a month, Reagan said, with convoys divided into smaller groups for the drive across Europe. Reagan has dubbed the vehicles supported through his and Flix’s efforts the “Flixmobiles.” Five have now been donated through a combination of fundraising and direct support.

In his prepared remarks, Reagan said his May convoy included the truck program’s 1,000th donated vehicle, with 26 vehicles delivered during that single run. The organization has since passed 1,100 vehicles.

Each truck, Reagan said, is estimated to save an average of 50 lives. “So it’s a pretty good ROI,” he told the audience. “I promised we wouldn’t talk about ROIs, but to me, 50 lives saved for the price of a truck is a pretty darn good deal.”

One Flixmobile later turned up unexpectedly in Kyiv, where two of Reagan’s Giraffe Mall partners recognized it, stopped the driver and took a photograph with the vehicle.

Ukraine Finds Its Way Behind the Bar
There is another Ukraine connection that didn’t make it into Reagan’s CinéShow remarks.

Flix Brewhouse’s original Round Rock location has employed Ukrainian-born Oleksandra “Sasha” Berezhnyk as its head brewer since July 2023. Reagan says he had nothing to do with hiring her, only for the two to later discover some remarkably overlapping ground.

Berezhnyk has twice brewed a seasonal beer called Kutia, inspired by the traditional Ukrainian holiday dish made with wheatberries, poppy seeds, honey, dried fruit and nuts. She has also collaborated on recipes with Ukrainian breweries VarVar and Brewery 2085.

After Berezhnyk joined Flix, Reagan helped connect her with the Central Texas Ukrainian-American community.

Then came an even stranger coincidence.

On one of Reagan’s trips to Ukraine, he visited an underground brewpub where patrons continued eating and drinking while air raid sirens sounded above street level. He later discovered it was a place Berezhnyk had worked before coming to Texas.

For a company built around movies and beer, it would be difficult to devise a more improbable connection.

How to Help Keep the Story Going
Reagan pointed CinéShow attendees toward two organizations he has worked with personally.

Liberty Ukraine Foundation, an all-volunteer organization based in Texas and Kyiv, is currently mounting a $100,000 campaign for portable heat and power units ahead of winter, with another donor offering to match contributions up to $50,000.

Patriots for Ukraine serves as the U.S. fundraising arm supporting the Estonia-based organization behind the vehicle convoys, allowing U.S. donors to make tax-deductible contributions toward the effort.

Reagan named a third organization, Soborna Ukraine, which supports programs for children who have lost a parent in the war, mostly their fathers. Reagan told the room. “These kids really represent the future of Ukraine, and they deserve to live in peace and freedom.”

The connection back to cinema was never far away. “For us, movie theaters have always been places where communities gather to experience stories that can change lives,” Reagan said.

Four years ago, one destroyed neighborhood cinema led Reagan halfway around the world looking for a way to help. He never rebuilt that theater. Instead, the search led him to help rebuild the shopping center around it, raise money through cinemas thousands of miles away, drive vehicles across Europe into Ukraine and forge relationships he could not possibly have anticipated when he first went searching for a damaged threeplex in Irpin.

He closed with a line he said has stayed with him: “Freedom is not defended by extraordinary people alone. It’s defended when ordinary people decide to do extraordinary things together.”

Then Reagan returned to what Ukraine had taught him personally. “Ukraine has taught me that courage really is contagious. Thank you for helping keep freedom alive. Slava Ukraini!”