SXSW 2025
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“This is Part of Where Our Title Came From — the Amount That Women are Censored”: Annapurna Sriram On Her SXSW-Premiering Fucktoys
While sitting on a raft in the middle of a Southern swamp, AP (Annapurna Sriram) learns that her recent string of bad luck, missing tooth included, is caused by a curse. A psychic (played by New Orleans-based rapper Big Freedia) reveals that the only way for AP to free herself from the spiritual bind is to sacrifice an innocent lamb in an ancient ritual. The needed ceremony will cost AP $1,000, which she promises to raise in just a few days. This sets the plot of Fucktoys in motion, which finds AP traversing her pastel yet putrid birthplace of Trashtown […]
by Natalia Keogan on Mar 9, 2025 -
“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 […]
by Ritesh Mehta on Mar 9, 2025 -
“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 […]
by Ritesh Mehta on Mar 9, 2025 -
“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 […]
by Lauren Wissot on Mar 9, 2025 -
“… 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 […]
by Lauren Wissot on Mar 9, 2025 -
“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 […]
by Ritesh Mehta on Mar 7, 2025 -
19 Films We’re Anticipating at the 2025 SXSW Film and TV Festival
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 […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 7, 2025
