Today, the South by Southwest (SXSW) Conference and Festivals announced that Janet Pierson, long-time VP, Director of the SXSW Film & TV Festival will shift to the role of Director Emeritus. Film Festival Programming Director Claudette Godfrey will now assume leadership of the SXSW Film & TV Festival. The 2022 edition of the SXSW Film & TV Festival marked Pierson’s 15th year as Festival Director. Her 45-year career has included various roles in the independent film landscape, notably as exhibitor, producer’s rep, executive producer and segment producer and segment director of IFC-Criterion’s Split Screen. According to a press release announcing […]

It took me a few days to leave the house after my dad died. I only left because I needed to get a dress for his funeral. Nobody at the Paramus Park Mall seemed to notice that my eyes were red and puffy, that the sleeves of my white sweatshirt were stained with snot. I walked among the living, scouring the store racks for a black dress. It was the end of the summer and everything was floral, pastel, or had shoulder holes. (Why, New Jersey, why?) I finally spotted an appropriate one on the sale rack, a size too […]

One of the great independent film discoveries of SXSW 2019 is a picture that is also one of the boldest artistic statements of year, Grace Glowicki’s Tito. The Canadian actor and director is known to Filmmaker readers as the female lead of 2016 25 New Face Ben Petrie’s Her Friend Adam, which I dubbed in these pages “a squirmy treatise on sexual insecurity and relationship oneupmanship.” Glowicki’s character’s response to her partner’s icky jealousy, I wrote, is one of “unrivaled power and blistering sexual humiliation, capped off by a loudly feigned orgasm that will erase in viewers any memory of […]