SXSW Film Festival 2017
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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. […]
by Erik Luers on Mar 20, 2017 -
SXSW 2017: Nanfu Wang’s I Am Another You and Jason Cortlund & Julia Halperin’s La Barracuda
While resisting the urge to hyperbolically and lazily link any one film I see at this year’s SXSW to another, allow me to quickly note that Nanfu Wang’s I Am Another You (a world premiere in the Documentary Feature Competition section) and Julia Halperin and Jason Cortlund’s La Barracuda (which world premiered in Narrative Feature Competition) are, at their core, about women voluntarily visiting a piece of America foreign to them (Florida and Texas, respectively) to reveal their bare selves in the process. Wang is from China, the character of Sinoloa is from England; both come to town with a purpose that may not always be clear, […]
by Erik Luers on Mar 20, 2017 -
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 […]
by Sean Malin on Mar 15, 2017 -
Richard Linklater on the Future of the Austin Film Society: “This is the Best Year We’ve Ever Had”
The Austin Film Society hosted a media-exclusive lunch this past Friday to discuss their most exciting current project: the redesign and expansion of their cinema and event space. Presented by Founder & Artistic Director Richard Linklater, CEO Rebecca Campbell, Head of Film & Creative Media Holly Herrick, architect Michael Hsu and Designtrait, the afternoon stressed a shared belief in making a place for Austinites to discover artistically significant cinema old and new. A repertory house, a first-run theater, a shrine to great records and beautiful poster art, and an event space equipped to host a multitude of special gatherings: it’s clear that the AFS […]
by Erik Luers on Mar 14, 2017 -
SXSW 2017: Lauren Wolkstein and Christopher Radcliff on The Strange Ones
Expanded from their 2011 short, Lauren Wolkstein and Christopher Radcliff’s The Strange Ones starts with a house fire. A young boy (James Freedson-Jackson) stands paralyzed in front of it, and next we see him on the road with someone (claiming to be?) his older brother (Alex Pettyfer). Over the course of a long, strange road trip, we slowly put together some (but definitely not all) the pieces of a story of sexual assault and two people on the run from the law. Motels, diners and farms are among the upstate New York locations. The impressively assured, enticingly semi-enigmatic film had its premiere Saturday morning […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 14, 2017 -
SXSW: Five Questions for Mr. Roosevelt Writer/Director/Star Noël Wells
Texas-born actress and comedian Noël Wells (Master of None, SNL, The Incredible Jessica James) steps into the director’s chair with her SXSW-debuting feature Mr. Roosevelt, which mixes a sort of low-key melancholic humor of self-discovery with a series of broader comedic set pieces also exploring issues of social anxiety, identity and relationships. For Emily, the offbeat comedian character played by Wells, comedy is both the source of identity and existential crisis. In a prologue, we see a young Emily perform at a school play to a laughing audience. She’s in tears afterwards until her mother explains to her that people […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 12, 2017 -
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 […]
by Lauren Wissot on Mar 12, 2017 -
Unaffordable Objects: Maya Dardel Director Magdalena Zyzak on Description in Film and Literature
Set in the literary world and dealing with a dying poet and novelist with an unusual end-of-life proposal, the Lena Olin-starring Maya Dardel is directed by two filmmakers who know something about the world of their film. Magdalena Zyzak wrote the recent novel The Ballad of Barnabas Pierkel as well as co-wrote and produced the feature film, Redland. Zachary Cotler is the author of five books of poetry, fiction and literary criticism, and he’s a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. In advance of their film’s premiere at the 2017 SXSW Film Festival, they’ve each penned an essay inspired by […]
by Magdalena Zyzak on Mar 12, 2017 -
SXSW: Five Questions for Spettacolo Directors Jeffrey Malmberg and Chris Shellen
In Jeff Malmberg’s 2010 Spirit Award-winning documentary Marwencol, an artist constructs a one-sixth scale imaginary town, populated with miniatures, that is both his creative project and therapeutic enterprise; it’s through this work that he processes a violent attack that left him near-dead and brain-damaged. For the new Spettacolo, Malmberg, this time directing with filmmaker Chris Shellen, has focused on another individual for whom the world is a stage. Here, however, the scope is larger as theater director Andrea Cresti gathers each year the citizens of his small town in Tuscany to make a play based on their lives and histories. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 11, 2017 -
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 […]
by Lauren Wissot on Mar 11, 2017
