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19 Films We’re Anticipating at the 2025 SXSW Film and TV Festival
It Ends The 2025 SXSW Film and TV Festival kicks off today in Austin, TX, and below are 19 films that we at Filmmaker are particularly excited about and recommend you check out.
It Ends. The title is a promise in 25 New Face Alexander Ullom’s brain-teasing debut feature, premiering as the director is all of 27 years old. Four zoomers get into a car, start driving, but then the road never ends—are they in a horror film, a puzzle, neither, both? Ambitious and often very funny, It Ends will keep you guessing not just about what’s going on, but what kind of film is going on, until the very end. — Vadim Rizov
Good Boy. Did Ben Leonberg name his dog Indy in anticipation of Good Boy, which is both of their independent film horror debuts? From a simple observation of canine behavior —”What dog owner hasn’t wondered why their dog barks at ‘nothing?”’ — Leonberg has created what he calls “a haunted house movie from an entirely new perspective.” The top billed dog stars alongside Shane Jensen in the story of an ailing man who retreats to a secluded rural cabin only to confront family trauma and supernatural forces, all of which are seen from Indy’s confused, protective and, often, very wet point of view. — Scott Macaulay
Forge. After first exploring a sibling relationship in her Mississippi-set short Delta, Forge is the story of twentysomething Chinese American siblings and expert forgers Coco and Raymond (played respectively by Andie Ju and Brandon Soo Hoo), who are tempted into a deal with a spoiled white millennial millionaire inheritor (Edmund Donovan) involving recreating his late grandfather’s damaged paintings—hurricanes are another trope that can’t be divorced from Miami—and duping them off to an art dealer from New York. With sharp, modern lighting in its night interiors and exteriors, and comfortably passing the Bechdel Test so often that it might have created a new ceiling, Forge is a thriller about feats of counterfeit, AI and the American Dream, but more about art, “American art,” worth and self worth. — Ritesh Mehta
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 Ritchey claims the baby was stillborn), a close-knit family’s unimaginable anguish, and one overriding question: How can a young woman be so traumatized by an unwanted pregnancy that she refuses to believe she’s even carrying? Until nine months later denial clashes with inescapable reality. — Lauren Wissot
Reeling. Shorts filmmaker Yana Alliata, who has worked in various film industry jobs (Fox Searchlight, FX Networks and Film Finances) makes her feature debut in this Hawaii-set independent, excecutive produced by Werner Herzog, dealing with trauma, memory and the implicit horror of family gatherings. Ryan Wuestewald stars as a man slowly recovering from a traumatic brain injury whose journey home to a birthday luau triggers possible memories of what may have caused that long scar jutting down the length of his skull. — SM
Fucktoys. The directing debut of actress Annapurna Sriram, Fucktoys finds AP (Sriram) traversing her pastel yet putrid birthplace of Trashtown for fast cash needed to pay for a ceremony to remove a bad-luck curse. A sex worker by trade, AP enlists the help of friends and tricks, including a nonbinary punk heartthrob (Sadie Scott), unhinged mullett-sporting Australian (Brandon Flynn) and sexy potential big spender (Francois Arnaud). As writer-director Sriram’s feature debut, the choice to shoot on 16mm is audacious, and cinematographer Cory Fraiman-Lott’s expert eye combined with Sriram’s impressively extensive pre-production prep produce visuals that are as striking and spunky as the central protagonist. — Natalia Keogan
The Baltimorons. Combining two favorite genres — the Christmas Eve odd-couple city comedy and the dental anxiety picture — The Baltimorons is the first feature directed by SXSW favorite Jay Duplass since 2012’s The Do-Deca-Penthalon. Anyone who has cracked a tooth on a holiday evening should relate to this story of a holiday romance between a newly sober man and his emergency dentist. — SM
Satisfaction. In a lead role, Emma Laird, recently seen as Alessandro Nivola’s wife in The Brutalist, brings a complex, conflicted emotional inner life to this dark drama about a romantic couple, both composers, whose sojourn to a beautiful Greek island provides the space for her interrogation around the origins of their relationship. Holy Spider lead Zar Amir Ebrahimi is both a producer and co-star, playing the woman whose encounter with Emma on a nude beach catalyzes a reckoning with trauma and the complexities around one’s reaction to it. — SM
The True Beauty of Being Bitten By a Tick. With four movies in five years (and one other, starring Charli XCX, in the can), Pete Ohs is becoming one of our most prolific independent auteurs, having mastered a truly minimalist production model in which he shoots, directs and often even captures sound. Actress Callie Hernandez, also a co-writer, is a returning collaborator here, playing alongside Zoe Chao and Jeremy O. Harris, the actor, playwright and producer whose new production company, bb², is behind the picture. With the title nodding to the chronic Lyme community, The True Beauty of Being Bitten By a Tick is “chilling wellness-core horror” about a weekend retreat upended by that spirochete-laden eight-legged terror. Bring your docycline. — SM
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 was a “radical uprising” from the rural community the trio of conservative birthing providers serve – Amish and Mennonite women willing to fight for their right not to engage with the medical industrial complex of the outside world. (Onward, Christian soldiers!) — LW
Brother Verses Brother. Seven years after we featured him in 2001’s 25 New Faces list on the basis of his truly excellent short film Helicopter, Ari Gold wrote that that selection “haunted” him as he tried to get new work off the ground. So, with a feature-length version of Helicopter described as a forthcoming “companion film” to this SXSW-premiering picture, Brother Verses Brother, starring no less than Alejandro Jodorowsky, I’m tremendously intrigued to catch up with what Gold has been up to. Taking the audience on a safari through the secret haunts of Jack Kerouac & Allen Ginsberg – and co-starring the last Beat poet on earth, 99-year-old Herbert Gold, in a role performed only weeks before his death,” Brother Verse Brother is described as “a live cinema musical novella… improvised by the director’s own family and filmed in one continuous shot.” — SM
Ash. Opening with Riya (Eiza González) waking up to find herself surrounded by dead crew members, RLJE films release Ash, a sci-fi thriller set on a planetary outpost, is musician-turned-director Flying Lotus’s follow-up to 2017’s Kuso. “With its overall novelty and the quality of its design work, from the labored-over texture of loose flayed flesh to the obsessive tweaking of a vast ‘cosmic fractal’ suspended in the sky, Ash stands out amidst the pack of cost-efficient B-movie programmers currently filling genre festivals,” writes Charles Bramesco’s in Filmmaker‘s Spring, 2025 issue.
Make It Look Real. Amidst all the intimacy coordinator discourse of the last several years — including Anora star Mikey Madison’s admission that she declined using one on that picture — it’s surprising that there hasn’t been, as far as I know, a documentary exploring the relatively new film industry position. That’s now corrected with this premiere from Australian director Kate Blackmore, Make It Look Real, which follows intimacy coordinator Claire Warden on a film in production (Tightrope, directed by Kieran Darcy-Smith) as she negotiates an actor’s comfort level with the demands of a three way-scene in the film’s screenplay. — SM
Armed only with a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud. An HBO doc that Craig Renaud, Brent’s brother (and my friend for the past dozen years, ever since I met the tight-knit siblings covering their now defunct Little Rock Film Festival) should never have had to make; instigated by an event no family should ever have to live through. Which puts Brent’s loved ones in the grieving company of untold numbers of families around the world. The very same people the award-winning conflict zone documentarian (alongside his younger sibling) dedicated his life to – and lost his life for on March 13, 2022 while covering Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It’s a stunning 37-minute eulogy, made all the more palpable through Brent’s own words and cinematography, to a brother and lifelong filmmaking partner, a dogged journalist and ultimately a victim of war. And in turn a powerful tribute to all conflict zone journalists, and to all victims of our never-ending wars. — LW
Death of a Unicorn. Producer Alex Scharfman (Resurrection, Blow the Man Down) makes his directorial debut with this premiering A24 release. Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega play a father and daughter on the run after accidentally mowing down the titular fantasy beast on the way to a billionaire’s retreat. — SM
Deepfaking Sam Altman. With 40,000 or so people attending the tech portion of SXSW, which runs concurrently with Film, the festival typically programs a healthy selection of tech-themed features, and one this year is the latest from Adam Bhala Lough, who appeared on Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces list in 2003 following his first feature, Bomb the System. Cleverly updating the Roger and Me doc movie quest narrative for the age of generative AI, Deepfaking Sam Altman finds Lough, on the heels of the hit Telemarketers, attempting to learn more about the disruptive technology by creating a bot of Open AI founder Sam Altman to “explore what it means to be alive, create art, and understand each other in an increasingly artificial world.” — SM
The Age of Disclosure. GOFAST, Gimbal, the Jellyfish, ominous Pentagon drone B-roll, and the ubiquitous former intelligence official Luis Elizondo — the UAP documentary is a veritable Tubi sub-genre, as filmmakers remix Navy footage and talking heads discussing “the phenomenon” until proof of alien life someday materializes. On the basis of its trailer, Dan Farah’s The Age of Disclosure has classier bona fides than most, with 34 government and military officials — including top-billed Marco Rubio (filmed presumably before his current gig as Secretary of State) and Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna — speaking about non-human life, efforts to reverse-engineer crashed aircraft, and the U.S. government’s attempt to keep this information from the American people. — SM
Idiotka. “The microbudget and short forms—which run on friendship, day jobs and guerilla-style everything—are a natural space for exploration in filmmaking,” wrote Nastasya Popov when introducing her short film Good Grief here at Filmmaker. And now, three years later, she’s premiering her debut feature, Idiotka at SXSW. Anna Baryshnikov is a Russian immigrant in West Hollywood whose dream is to compete in a fashion-themed reality TV show. Julia Fox is among the packed cast of co-stars. — SM
Are We Good? No Marc Maron listener can forget his raw, anguished podcast in the immediate aftermath of the loss of his partner, the filmmaker Lynn Shelton, who died of suddenly-diagnosed leukemia during the COVID-19 pandemic. Steven Feinartz’s documentary, Are We Good?, follows Maron as, a year later, he incorporates that experience into a new performance while processing other life events, including the declining health of his father. — SM
