SXSW Film Festival 2025
-
“Telling the Story Non-Linearly Felt Essential Because That’s How Trauma Often Works”: Alex Burunova On Her SXSW-Premiering Relationship Drama, Satisfaction
Emma Laird is both incandescent and haunted as she limns the before and after of trauma in Alex Burunova’s SXSW-premiering debut feature, Satisfaction. As Lola, a composer and pianist, Laird is charismatic and full of life in the past and painfully muted in the present, a contrast that engineers the film’s central narrative mystery. Through memory-triggered flashbacks and forwards, Satisfaction orbits around a moment of trauma, the film’s editing rhythms and narrative structure mirroring the emotional evasiveness and repression that Lola must deploy during a Greek island vacation with her musician boyfriend, Philip (Fionn Whitehead). But repression as self-preservation can only […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 13, 2025 -
“Slime Everywhere”: Grace Glowicki and U.S. Girls’ Meg Remy on Dead Lover
A lonely woman, solely referred to as Gravedigger, has never known romance due to the putrid scent she absorbs from her occupational namesake in the latest feature from director, star and co-writer Grace Glowicki following 2019’s Tito. One fateful night, Gravedigger’s lucky stars align when a handsome nobleman (co-writer Ben Petrie, Glowicki’s husband/frequent collaborator) becomes infatuated by this “fetid creature,” whose smell has the unexpected effect of turning him on. The film, however, is entitled Dead Lover, clearly alluding to the tragic conclusion of Gravedigger’s whirlwind romance. Desperate to rekindle their passion, she takes her lover’s only remains—a formidable ring […]
by Natalia Keogan on Mar 9, 2025 -
“This Isn’t Air Bud or Lassie, Where the Dog is Always Happy-Go-Lucky”: Director Ben Leonberg on His Canine-POV SXSW Horror Film, Good Boy
From a simple observation of canine behavior —”What dog owner hasn’t wondered why their dog barks at ‘nothing?’” — Ben Leonberg has with his SXSW-premiering Good Boy created what he calls “a haunted house movie from an entirely new perspective.” Leonberg’s own dog Indy stars alongside Shane Jensen in this story of an ailing man who retreats to his family’s secluded rural cabin only to confront generational trauma and supernatural forces. With Larry Fessenden as the family patriarch, whose foreboding presence appears solely through distressed VHS tapes playing, Skinamarink-style, on outdated TVs, the house here becomes something of a liminal […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 9, 2025
