In Code of the West, director Rebecca Richman Cohen chronicles the legislative machinations surrounding Montana’s endangered medical marijuana law. The debate, which was colored by outrageous, scaremongering claims about increased teen use and demonic possession, revolved around the possibility of an outright repeal of the initial 2004 law, which spawned an industry that became the ire of conservative politicians and family groups. During the  vote on a proposed repeal, DEA agents raided  26 ostensibly legal cannabis growing sights across the state and put the state’s biggest caregivers out of operation, including one owned by Tom Daubert, the protagonist of Cohen’s …

Two of the events I was most looking forward to seeing this year at SXSW Interactive were Jason Brush’s talk, Filmmaking as User Experience and Michel Reilhac’s “Meet the Insiders” panel, “Storytelling + Interactive.” Brush teaches at UCLA’s Department of Film, Television and Visual Media and is Executive Vice President of Creative & UX at POSSIBLE. Reilhac, who I have written about before at Filmmaker, is an independent transmedia director, story writer and consultant, and one of the most passionate and eloquent voices for new forms of interactive storytelling. Unfortunately, as is often the case at SXSW, once I put …

SXSW is a festival of contradictions. (Or, “Spring Break for filmmakers,” as Ti West posted on his Twitter stream last night.) Its film program feels homey, intimate, with Janet Pierson and her team evincing a real sense of enthusiasm as well as curatorial play. There are, of course, types of films that are expected and do well at SXSW: cutting-edge genre titles, hip mainstream features, music- and technology-themed documentaries, and low-budget, youth-oriented relationship tales. But within and even outside of those categories, SXSW always turns up some real discoveries. (Last year there were several — Sean Baker’s Starlet, Andrew Neel’s …

First things first – Texas’s Thin Line Film Fest does not take place in Austin, nor in March, nor does it accept indie narratives, nor any fiction films at all. In fact, this six-year-old event, which plays a month prior to SXSW, smartly doesn’t define itself in relation to that cinematic elephant in the Lone Star State. Which is its strength. Texas’s only fest devoted strictly to docs – from local to international – Thin Line (the name inspired by its founders’ desire to explore that space between fact and fiction) does take over Denton, Texas, for 10 days in …

An often shocking documentary on Ginger Baker, the wildest of wild rock & roll drummers of the 60s and 70s, Jay Bulger’s profoundly entertaining yarn Beware of Mr. Baker follows the original drummer of the late Sixties supergroup Cream well after he’s fallen victim to bouts of psychosis and megalomania. In the mid 1960s, Cream (Baker, bassist Jack Bruce and of course guitarist Eric Clapton) achieved tremendous popularity almost overnight for their blues and psychedelia infused rock, but they burned out quickly, disbanding in 1968, prompting Baker to start a downward spiral of unparalleled substance abuse. Forty years after Cream’s demise, …

In Sophia Takal’s Green, a couple of young, New York sophisticates travel upstate in order to research a book on sustainable farming, but when a working-class local woman becomes the object of their affection, jealousy and sexual gamesmanship threaten to ruin their relationship. Mining the insecurities that persist amongst young lovers is not necessarily new ground, but Takal, working with her fiance Lawrence Levine and roommate Kate Lyn Sheil, invests the storytelling with a moody disquiet, an emotional honesty and a jarring sense of foreboding that elevate the film above so many of its predecessors. Widely deploying the color of envy in …

Prior to its BAMcinemaFest screening on June 28, Tim Sutton’s festival favorite Pavilion has a haunting new trailer — featuring a new song from The Sea and Cake’s Sam Prekop — which we are delighted to be exclusively premiering on the Filmmaker website. In the current issue of the magazine, Scott wrote the following on the film: Tim Sutton’s Pavilion, premiering in the Emerging Visions section, is a beautifully shot and tantalizingly subtle tale of the fragility of adolescent friendships. A teenage boy (Max Schaffner) spends summers with his mother in upstate New York before traveling to stay with his …

I am not cut out for big festivals…film or otherwise. Let’s take away the fact that large crowds disturb my calm, on top of that I am a person of extremes. I either jump in all the way, or abstain from the activity entirely. Take a person like that and just feed them beer and films…and you get the worn-out mess that is myself. Two days after the experience I’m still sick, tired, and working hard to gain a foothold on what the festival meant to me and what it means to our industry. Industry is a great place to …

I pack quickly the night before leaving for SXSW. Not only do I forget to bring business cards, I don’t even pack my digital camera. I pop into a CVS once I’ve landed in Austin and pick up a two-pack of disposable cameras. I’m surprised they still sell them. My five day jaunt across SXSW is a flurry of rain, movies, tacos, friends, panels, and long lines. I watch Purple Rain on VHS. I watch V/H/S in a movie theater. I’m asked by multiple people if I’ve heard what this year’s Tiny Furniture is. I hear a big-four agent tell …