SXSW
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“Telling the Story Non-Linearly Felt Essential Because That’s How Trauma Often Works”: Alex Burunova On Her SXSW-Premiering Relationship Drama, Satisfaction
Satisfaction
Emma Laird is both incandescent and haunted as she limns the before and after of trauma in Alex Burunova’s SXSW-premiering debut feature, Satisfaction. As Lola, a composer and pianist, Laird is charismatic and full of life in the past and… Read more
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“Intersex People Don’t Need To Be Fixed”: Grace Hughes-Hallett on The Secret of Me
A seemingly breakthrough medical innovation from the ’60s set off a still-ongoing worldwide trend of surgeries performed on “atypical” babies. Those surgeries were celebrated in the context of the gender equality movements of the 70s, but over the long tail of history, the trauma inflicted by this innovation revealed those marginalized by the results: a largely hidden and, per the stats, sizable community of people worldwide assembled under the queer umbrella. Premiering at SXSW 2025, The Secret of Me is British director Grace Hughes-Hallett’s directorial debut, but you may already know her as the producer of 2018’s Three Identical Strangers. The main […]
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“Miami is the City of Hustle”: Jing Ai Ng on SXSW 2025 Premiere Forge
Common associations audiences might have with Miami: cruise lines, café con leche, beach parties, plastic surgery, Art Basel, Dexter, Scarface, a diverse and predominantly Latino and Caribbean population. AFI Conservatory graduate Jing Ai Ng wants to turn some of those tropes around with her debut feature Forge, premiering in the Narrative Spotlight section of SXSW 2025. The Malaysian-born filmmaker grew up shuttling between Southeast Asia and Miami and wanted to honor the Florida city she knew—that of first and second gen Asian subcultures, rare dim sum restaurants and a particular vein of white collar crime: art forgery. After first exploring […]
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“Women Like Gail are Often Vilified in the Media as Cold-Blooded Killers and Even Monsters”: Jessica Earnshaw on her SXSW-Debuting Baby Doe
Baby Doe is the latest from Jessica Earnshaw, whose Jacinta won the Albert Maysles Best New Documentary Director Award at Tribeca 2020. While that film followed a mother-daughter relationship bound up in drugs, incarceration and generational trauma, Baby Doe stars a happily married mother and grandmother who likely never even smoked a cigarette or garnered a speeding ticket. Indeed, Gail Ritchey was an unassuming conservative Christian living in rural Ohio until the magic of DNA matched the fifty-something to “Geauga’s Child,” a newborn left abandoned in the woods three decades ago. Which soon led to an arrest for murder (though […]
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“… The Visual Approach of the Documentary is Deeply Influenced by Amish and Mennonite Norms”: Elaine Epstein on her SXSW-Premiering Arrest the Midwife
As its nonsensical title might imply, Elaine Epstein’s Arrest the Midwife centers on the plight of three certified professional midwives who, after the death of a newborn (ironically, at a hospital one of the midwives rushed her client to the minute she noticed complications), find themselves in the crosshairs of their local authorities in upstate New York, one of only 11 states where midwifery is either illegal or highly restricted. (NYC midwives might consider moving to progressive Alabama.) And while the tale is quite harrowing, it’s also unexpectedly empowering. For what the (male) police and prosecutors didn’t quite bargain for […]
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“I’ve Been Trying to Coin the Phrase ‘Hangout Horror'”: Alexander Ullom on SXSW 2025 Premiere It Ends
In the last decade, a growing number of films and TV shows have iterated the time loop: Russian Doll‘s nested doll approach, Inception‘s infinitely spinning top. Alexander Ullom’s feature debut It Ends subverts those genre expectations at every turn—or rather, at every absence of a turn. Premiering in SXSW 2025’s Narrative Feature Competition, the film might superficially be grouped alongside similar-sounding genre titles like It, It Comes at Night and How It Ends. But as Ullom explained to me, his intentions were both more playful and somber. In a sense, this story about four zoomers who get into a car […]
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Back To One, Episode 282, Ben and Suzanne, A Reunion in 4 Parts star Anastasia Olowin On the 10-Year Journey to Bring the SXSW Hit to the Screen
The Brooklyn-based actor Anastasia Olowin stars in Shaun Seneviratne’s Ben and Suzanne, A Reunion in 4 Parts, which just had its world premiere at the SXSW Film Festival. She has such a command of the screen and brings so much life to her character, it’s hard to believe this is her first feature film. On this episode, she takes us back to her training at NYU’s Experimental Theater Wing, her eight years producing and acting in new work for the stage, and the 10-year journey to bring Ben and Suzanne to the screen. She talks about the collaborative process at […]
