SXSW 2022
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“… A Means of Creating a Fulfilling Life, Rather Than Just About Creating a Film”: Morrisa Maltz on Her Lily Gladstone-Starring The Unknown Country
This interview with the director of the recommended The Unknown Country was originally posted during the 2022 SXSW Film Festival and is being reposted today as the film opens in New York, Los Angeles and other markets via Music Box Films. — Editor From the plains of the Dakotas to the Mexican-American border, landscape — seen through rain-streaked windshields at night, from overhead drone shots, and from the point-of-view of a single woman moving across a country that’s both reassuring and suddenly alien — is both subject and setting in The Unknown Country, the debut dramatic feature from artist and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 27, 2022 -
“King Crimson Being a Way of Doing Things as Opposed to a Set Organism”: Director Toby Amies on His SXSW Doc, In the Court of the Crimson King
When Toby Amies emails me the Vimeo press link to his SXSW-premiering documentary on the band King Crimson, In the Court of the Crimson King, he appends a list of influences. There’s a documentarian (Ross McElwee), a pseudo-documentarian (Christopher Guest), a narrative filmmaker who is a real King Crimson fan (Vincent Gallo) and then a couple of directors whose impact remained a bit puzzling both before and after seeing the film: Ernst Lubitsch and Sam Peckinpah. But perhaps the cinephile (and King Crimson fan) in me was looking too closely, because after watching In the Court of the Crimson King […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 16, 2022 -
I Love My Dad, Master of Light Win Top Feature Prizes at SXSW
At its live awards ceremony SXSW announced tonight the jury and special award winners of the 29th annual SXSW Film Festival. James Morosini’s I Love My Dad — starring the writer/director along with Patton Oswald — won the Narrative Feature Competition, and Rosa Ruth Boesten’s documentary about painter George Anthony Morton, Master of Light, won the Documentary Feature Competition. Other notable winners include Iliana Sosa, a Filmmaker 25 New Face whose What We Leave Behind won two awards: The Fandor New Voices Award and the Louis Black Lone Star Award. Films will continue to be available on the SXSW platform […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Mar 16, 2022 -
Ambition in Filmmaking, Mia Goth’s Dual Role and His Sirkian A24 Prequel: Ti West on His SXSW-Premiering X
After 2016’s Western, In the Valley of Violence, and several years directing episodic TV, Ti West (The House of the Devil, The Inkeepers, The Sacrament) makes a very welcome return to the world of feature horror with X, a ’70s-set picture in which the sort of ambition that has characterized West’s impressive filmography is both evident on screen as well as the subtext driving the film’s characters. The set-up: a ragtag group of filmmakers ensconce themselves in a rented barn outside a foreboding farmhouse straight out of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to make a porno feature, The Farmer’s Daughter. Mia […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 14, 2022 -
Five Questions for Casey Neistat about His SXSW-Premiering David Dobrik Documentary, Under the Influence
When Casey Neistat, along with his brother Van, made Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces list in 2006, he had already made over 300 shorts that had played at film festivals, museums and online. Three years later he launched an HBO series. But Google Neistat now and the information panel for the 40-year filmmaker offers a single blunt ID: “American YouTuber.” It was only in 2010 that Neistat began posting his work on YouTube and in 2015 that these postings became daily, a profusion of content (and subscribers — 12 million) that have made him a progenitor of a newer generation of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 12, 2022 -
“It’s About the Emotion, the Performance, the Rhythm and the Space in Between the Words”: Rosa Ruth Boesten on Her SXSW-Debuting doc Master of Light
A stunning work of cinematic nonfiction, Rosa Ruth Boesten’s Master of Light follows the classical painter George Anthony Morton, a fan of Rembrandt who conjures exquisite portraits of his own family members in the style of the Old Masters. Never formally trained, Morton nonetheless managed to land a spot at the New York branch of The Florence Academy of Art, eventually going on to study in Europe and win awards abroad. Which would be a remarkable feat for any American, let alone a Black man from Kansas City who spent a decade behind bars for dealing drugs. But likewise remarkable […]
by Lauren Wissot on Mar 12, 2022 -
Building a Microbudget Ghost Story Around an AirBnB Location: Director Pete Ohs and Cast on the SXSW-Premiering Jethica
Two women, each fleeing unspecified trauma, holed up in an aluminum-sided mobile home in the middle of a desolate patch of New Mexico flatlands is an apt set-up for a microbudget horror film, but the pleasures and originality of Pete Ohs SXSW-premiering Jethica are in the ways in which it avoids all the more obvious narrative pathways it might have taken. (Indeed, it’s an exemplar of George Saunders’s dictum of “ritual banality avoidance” — rejecting the “crappo version” of a story.) There are no screams or shaky-cam chases, no woman-in-jeopardy jump scares. Instead, Ohs has worked with his actors to […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 11, 2022 -
“There Were No Easy Answers to My Questions”: Iliana Sosa on Her SXSW-Debuting Doc What We Leave Behind
Iliana Sosa’s What We Leave Behind is an astonishingly intimate labor of love. The film emerged from Sosa’s desire to document her grandfather Julián, a proudly hardworking man who first left his native Mexico back in the early 1940s to join the US government’s Bracero program, which brought in farm workers to remedy the WWII labor shortage. After his daughters, including the filmmaker’s mom, moved permanently to the States, the widowed Julián spent the next two decades traveling solo from Durango to visit them in the southwest. But as he now nears his nonagenarian years the monthly bus trip becomes […]
by Lauren Wissot on Mar 11, 2022
