SXSW Features
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Eight Shorts From SXSW 2017
As the 2017 edition of SXSW comes to a close, here’s a list of eight short films I saw that are worthy of your attention. There’s no clear throughline apparent here: documentary work investigating the infected water supply of the DC water crisis, midnight selections featuring mannequin heads that come to life to suck face, and miscellaneous narrative shorts that cover everything from the ending of a romantic relationship to a bond formed during an impending school shooting. Many will continue to screen on the festival circuit throughout the year, and some will be made readily available online before you know it. […]
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Creative Fraternity: Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio on their SXSW Doc, May It Last: A Portrait of the Avett Brothers
Two decades of writing, producing, and finally directing some of the most commercially and critically successful films in the world have given Judd Apatow enough cachet to make nearly anything. After his directorial debut, The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005), took in more than $175 million in domestic gross revenue, his Apatow Productions produced an ongoing string of gargantuan hits, including Knocked Up (2007), Superbad (2007), Bridesmaids (2011) and Trainwreck (2015). But it is only within the last three years that Apatow has moved into a seemingly unlikely genre: documentary film. Last year saw his first nonfiction work as co-director with Michael […]
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Following The Money Shot: Ovidie on Her SXSW Investigative Doc Pornocracy
Originally trained in philosophy, and known as the “porn star intellectual” since the publication of her book Porno Manifesto in the early aughts, feminist pornographer Ovidie can now add hard-hitting investigative journalist to her CV. The French icon’s latest documentary Pornocracy, debuting at SXSW (and later in the month at CPH:DOX), is a stunning exploration of the dark underbelly of online porn — a shadowy world in which a single faceless multinational corporation, with numerous offshore accounts, controls what we see while exploiting the performers whose very livelihood it shamelessly steals. Filmmaker spoke with Ovidie prior to the doc’s March […]
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No Way Out: Brent and Craig Renaud on Their SXSW Doc, METH STORM: Arkansas USA
World premiering March 11th at SXSW is METH STORM: Arkansas USA, the latest HBO doc from the Peabody (and Edward R. Murrow and Columbia Dupont and Overseas Press Club) award-winning Renaud brothers. Unsurprisingly, the Arkansan siblings have taken a deeply humanistic approach to the meth epidemic with this film, following a soft-spoken DEA agent struggling to stem the flow of (cheap and extremely potent) Mexican cartel “ice” into his rural community. They parallel this narrative with that of a close-knit family of impoverished addicts, led by a no- nonsense matriarch who just can’t seem to catch a break. It’s been […]
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An Experiment in Biohacking: Director Kate McLean on the SXSW Short, Gut Hack
Last year, a friend asked me to come to an event about synthetic biology. I’m a documentary filmmaker, and I suspected the evening was going to be a bit over my head, but she was speaking and I wanted to show support. When I arrived, the speakers were a mix of academics, industry types, enthusiasts and scientists. I began to prepare myself in for a night of polite nodding and drinking as a man from a biotech company took the microphone to present some kind of recruitment talk about his company. Then, back near the bar, someone started to boo […]
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SXSW: Five Questions with Spaceship Producer Olivier Kaempfer
He may only have three features under his belt, but producer Olivier Kaempfer is quickly establishing himself as an central figure in London’s independent film community. His first production, director Jules Bishop’s Borrowed Time, won Best of the Fest at Edinburgh in 2012, and his second, Desiree Akhavan’s Appropriate Behavior, broke out at Sundance 2014 followed by a successful theatrical run and extensive critical praise. Now his third film, Spaceship, a family drama packaged as a trippy science-fiction story, has pushed Kaempfer and his company Parkville Pictures into new territory, both in terms of content and the production process. Written and directed by Alex Taylor, the […]
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SXSW Announces the 145 Features Playing in its 2015 Lineup
SXSW announced today the 145 features being show in its upcoming SXSW Film Conference, March 13-21 in Austin, TX. From a record number of 2,385 feature submissions will be shown new work by directors Hannah Fidell, Benjamin Dickinson, Patrick Wang, Ron Nyswaner, Alex Sichel, Ondi Timoner and Alex Garland, among many others. The festival’s Episodics strand continues, with five new web series being shown in this second year. Of the large number of submissions, Festival Director Janet Pierson said, ““When faced with a record 2,400 feature submissions, we had every intention to cut back on the total number in our […]
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Zachary Wigon, John Gallagher, Jr. and Kate Lyn Sheil on Intimacy, the Internet and The Heart Machine
Premiering at SXSW in its Narrative Feature Competition, The Heart Machine, the first feature from film journalist Zachary Wigon, is an astute romantic drama tackling the interpersonal confusion of our internet age. (Full disclosure: Zach Wigon has written for Filmmaker, and I contributed to the film’s Kickstarter campaign.) With technology altering and intermediating the ways we discover each other, meet, communicate and even break up, our romantic rulebooks are being surreptitiously rewritten, and right under our noses. Yes, a kiss is still a kiss, but is a text just a text? Or, in the case of Wigon’s film, a Skype […]
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The Women of SXSW: Fort Tilden Writer/Director/Editor Sarah-Violet Bliss
Following “The Women of Sundance” article in our print and online additions, Danielle Lurie continues her coverage of female filmmakers with a series of interviews highlighting women directors at SXSW. In this interview, she talks with Sarah-Violet Bliss, who co-wrote and co-directed the SXSW Grand Jury Prize-winning narrative feature Fort Tilden with Charles Rogers. Filmmaker: Why this movie? Why did you decide to do it? Bliss: I was excited to tell a story in response to the popular topic of discussion these days frequently labeled “millennial malaise.” I have many thoughts on this matter in hand that are enormously fun […]
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Producer Jason Blum @SXSW: “If I Had to Make Kicking and Screaming Today, I’d Make It for $50,000…”
“If I had to make [Noah Baumbach’s 1995 pic] Kicking and Screaming today, I’d make it for $50,000, not $1 million,” said producer Jason Blum (The Purge, Insidious, Whiplash) at his SXSW keynote address on Sunday. In a conversation with the Los Angeles Times’ John Horn, Blum blended his own producer origin story with practical advice for filmmakers seeking to emulate his rise to top of Hollywood’s low-budget horror hierarchy. “Don’t wait for the industry to go forward,” he told the crowd, explaining that his own career was accelerated when he learned from a past error: passing on The Blair […]
