Wow, this news threw me for a loop. According to indieWIRE, our mutual friend Matt Dentler, producer of the South By Southwest Film Festival since 2004, is leaving his post (and Austin) to move to New York City, where he will head the marketing and programming operations of Cinetic Media's new digital rights management unit. Replacing Dentler as SXSW producer will be Janet Pierson, long-time independent film producer and board member of the Austin Film Society.
I've never met Pierson (well, that I know of ... you do get introduced to so many people at film fests, it's hard to keep track of everyone sometimes ... ) but I feel like I know her, from watching the documentary Reel Paradise, which she made with her husband, John. That film documented the year the Piersons and their two children spent living on a remote island in Fiji running the only movie theater on the island. I also wrote last year about John Pierson smacking down on Michael Moore, whose film Roger & Me was sold by the Piersons to Warner Brothers for the then-unheard-of sum of $3 million.
Janet Pierson has fantastic indie street cred, she's a passionate lover of independent film, and I'm sure she'll do a stellar job heading up SXSW. We at Cinematical extend our warmest welcome to her, and wish our friend Matt great luck and joy in his new endeavor. Matt is one of our favorite indie-film-world people, and we hope that he'll come back to SXSW every year to just enjoy the fest for a change, rather than running to and fro introducing films and shepherding talent around. We'll save you a seat at the Alamo, Matt, and there's a five-dollar milkshake with your name on it when we see you there.
*Update: Check out indieWIRE's well-informed piece on Cinetic's plans for Dentler and Pierson on stepping into Dentler's shoes.
If you weren't in Austin for South by Southwest -- or even if you were, and your schedule, like mine, was so incredibly packed with films and parties, that you missed out on catching some of the many panels there, you're in luck. For your listening convenience, the SXSW website has podcasts of the panels up. There were panels on just about every topic imaginable at the fest, from "Animation and Digital Effects on a Budget," to "The Porn Police: Know the Rules" (that one featured the never-shy-about-baring-his-all Joe Swanberg), to journalist Sarah Lacy's "controversial" interview with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's, which just about descended into all-out chaos.
I've heard the entire interview, watched parts of it on YouTube, and read heaps of blog comments ripping Lacy to shreds, and I gotta say, I don't see what people were so riled up about in that room, or why the audience turned on her so harshly there toward the end. Yes, it was a conversational-style interview, not a hard-hitting smackdown.
Heavy Metal in Baghdad, which had its US premiere at SXSW, follows Acrassicauda, Iraq's only (yes, only) heavy metal band, as they try to stay alive and keep making music through the fall of Saddam Hussein and the growing insurgency in the aftermath of the Iraq war. This is the kind of film that makes me tremendously grateful to live in a country where I can freely write about film, or pick up a camera and make one. I can pick up a bass and start a rock band, and I can dress how I like and wear my hair how I like without fear of being shot or arrested.
The members of Acrassicauda, before they moved out of Iraq to Syria and then Turkey, did not have those priveliges. For them, the mere wearing of at Metallica t-shirt, or growing their hair long, or even wearing a goatee, could mark them for harrasment, imprisonment, or death. Filmmakers Eddy Moretti and Suroosh Alvi follow the band from 2003-2006, capturing the band's hopes, dreams, and attempts to keep the band together amidst mortar fire, car bombs, and the ever-growing threat of persecution for embodying Western ideals through their music.
SXSW 2008 from mikehedge on Vimeo. Oh, my, this made me smile. Mike Hedge has a fantastic video montage of his time at South by Southwest, from the road trip to Austin from California and back, and capturing all the little moments that make the fest so special from beginning to end. This little video is a great example of beautifully edited short filmmaking; there's better edits here than I've seen in many a fest film, and he does a great job of telling a story without a line of dialog or voiceover. If you were at SXSW, you'll enjoy reliving your own fest memories by watching it, and if you weren't, well ... it'll make you want to be there next year.
Well done, and thanks, Mike, for so perfectly capturing what's so great about SXSW.
On the morning of March 9, when we were at SXSW, I met a fellow involved with the short film Glory at Sea. He was sitting in the lobby of the Ramada Inn where I was staying, and he was dazed and confused because he'd just been involved in a terrible car accident on the way to their film's premiere with some fellow crew members, including director Benh Zeitlin, who, as we spoke, was in emergency surgery for a shattered hip bone and broken pelvis. Zeitlin is recovering from his injuries, thankfully, but he had no medical insurance, and is facing tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills and lost work time as he recovers.
Rooftop Films, which helped finance the short, has set up a webpage for those who'd like to help a fellow filmmaker out. They've also asked filmmakers whose films screened at SXSW to let Zeitlin borrow DVD screeners to watch, since of course he ended up missing out on the entire fest. I can't imagine going through all the work to make a film, getting it accepted at SXSW, and then having this happen; we'd like to encourage anyone who may be so inclined to visit Rooftop's page about Zeitlin and lend a hand to help him out. They're also looking into setting up some benefit screenings, and when we have word of those, we'll keep you apprised.
Stuyvesant High School in New York City is one of the most prestigious public schools in the country. Only 3% of the 25,000 students who apply there are accepted. Before the screening of Frontrunners, director Caroline Suh told the crowd that one reason she chose Stuyvesant for filming a documentary about a high school election is because the students there are likely, in their adult years, to be the future leaders of our country. Competition is tough at Stuyvesant, and because the student body is made up of kids from all five boroughs of New York City, its composed of a melting pot of ethnic and economic diversity that, in its way, reflects the diversity of the country. Well, kind of -- if the country had a 50% Asian population and was entirely composed of the top 3%.
What is reflective of our country is the school's voter apathy. Of the 3,200 students attending Stuyvesant, most of them don't vote in the student union elections, or even know or care who's running. Like many adults living in the United States who don't exercise their right to vote, most of the students at Stuyvesant simply don't see the elections as relevant to their lives. Frontrunners follows the four tickets running for the offices of Student Union president and vice-president in the school's most recent elections, and the candidates' battle to garner the most votes from those students who do care enough to participate in the process.
On February 12, 2005, Sister Dorothy Stang, a Catholic nun and environmental and social activist, was gunned down in the Brazilian rainforest in which she had lived and worked for over 30 years. The trials of the gunmen and the rancher accused of arranging for her murder sent shockwaves through the environmental community, exposing the politics surrouding the battle over the future of the rain forest and the plight of the peasant farmers who live there. Stang, who was born in Dayton, Ohio, but became a naturalized Brazilian citizen, had fought and worked on behalf of the farmers of the region for decades, working with the Brazilian government to establish sustainable living communities that would allow poor farmers to survive while preserving the natural habitat from excessive deforestation.
Filmmaker Daniel Junge followed Stang's brother David to Brazil, to make They Killed Sister Dorothy, a documentary about Stang's lifework and the effort to bring her killers to justice. The filmmakers also had unprecedented access to the defendants and the defense team, allowing them to show both sides of the story. Sister Dorothy's perspective is told largely through interviews with those who knew her best: the peasant farmers among whom she lived and work, her fellow Sisters of Notre Dame, who lived and worked with her in Brazil, the federal prosecutor who was her friend and ally, and Sister Dorothy herself, through archival footage.
It's been a fun week here at the South by Southwest Film Festival. Austin is a great town; it kind of has a Seattle vibe with a Texas twang. Yesterday was the last day of the fest for me, so I squeezed in a few last movies. Yesterday afternoon, I saw my favorite doc of the fest so far, Some Assembly Required. This nice little doc follows several groups of kids who have entered a toy design contest. I really enjoyed it -- it's smart and very well edited, right down to the amusing interstitials.
After that, I met up with Melanie Addington from Oxford Film Festival and Eric D. Snider, and we headed to the Alama Ritz to catch Yeast and grab some lunch. (No, I did NOT have another milkshake, stop looking at me like that! Okay, I did have a milkshake -- vanilla, and it was sooooo good -- but I didn't inhale.) Yeast stars mumblecore darling Greta Gerwig (who I've also recently enjoyed very much in Baghead and Hannah Takes the Stairs), director Mary Bronstein, and Amy Judd. Yeast is kind of a mumblecore chick-flick about Rachel, a maddeningly annoying control-freak dealing with her fractured relationships with two friends.
Mister Lonely, directed by Harmony Korine (who previously wrote the screenplay for Larry Clark's Kids), starts out with a great idea: a Michael Jackson impersonator meets a Marilyn Monroe impersonator who takes him to a remote commune for celebrity impersonators, where she lives with her husband Charlie Chaplin and daughter Shirley Temple, along with the Pope, the Queen of England, James Dean, Madonna and the Three Stooges.
Once Jackson settles into this would-be paradise for people who aren't quite what they seem, things start to go a bit awry. Jealousies lurk beneath the surface and start to bubble over; the commune's sheep population gets sick and has to be taken down; and tensions rise. The group pulls together a celebrity impersonator variety show that they hope will attract crowds from far and wide to see and appreciate what they do, but in that effort, too, nothing comes out quite the way they'd hoped.
Shockingly, I missed my 11AM screening by a nose yesterday morning, so I decided to catch up on some much-needed caffeine consumption and writing before meeting up with some of the Cine gang for some delish cheese enchiladas at The Rio Grande. After lunch, we followed the herd of people heading into the 4:20 screening of Super High Me, director Michael Blieden's documentary about comedian Doug Benson's quest to spend 30 solid days smoking (legal in California, medical grade) marijuana from wake-and-bake to bedtime. While we at Cinematical would, of course, never advocate the use of illegal drugs, the concept of buying weed in a pristine shop, where they offer a veritable cornucopia of weed choices for your medical needs, was certainly intriguing.
The movie was pretty darn funny from start to finish; the crowd response was certainly positive throughout, though whether that was because a sizable percentage of the audience was engaging in their own scientific experiments on the effects of weed on the enjoyment of a movie about being stoned, or just because the movie itself was funny, is hard to say.
Here's a gallery of SXSW scene pics for you ... more of the post after the jump.
Saturday was a very busy day here at SXSW. We were up absurdly late on Friday night, and then awakened at 8AM by a car alarm going off outside our window, followed by all four of my kids' soccer coaches calling me from OKC to let me know that today's games were canceled due to cold weather. Thanks, guys, but I'm in Austin. After the panel this morning, I grabbed lunch with filmmaker AJ Schnack (Kurt Cobain: About a Son), who also writes a very excellent blog called All These Wonderful Things.
We gabbed about documentaries, traveling for film fests, balancing work and family, and lots of other stuff; he's a supremely nice guy and it's always fun chatting with someone who's as big a dork for documentary films as I am. Our lunch ran long due to crowds at all the area restaurants, so I missed the screening of We Are Wizards and had to bump it out to a later day in the fest.
The classically simple premise of Shuttle sounds like a horror movie, tapping into an uncommon fear you push back into the corner of your mind, marked "unlikely -- I hope." Best friends Mel (Peyton List) and Jules (Cameron Goodman) arrive at an airport late one rainy night, returning home from a trip to Mexico. Mel is feeling sick and unsteady on her feet, giving smooth-talking Seth (James Snyder) an opening to start flirting with the two young ladies, and forcing his traveling buddy Matt (Dave Power) to tag along.
The attractive foursome end up together on a shuttle mini-bus, along with a very nervous man in a business suit (Cullen Douglas). The driver (Tony Curran) takes an odd detour through a bad neighborhood; when questioned, he insists he knows where he's going. As the blocks of abandoned buildings roll by, the kids become agitated. The increasingly tense atmosphere on the shuttle is ratcheted up by a near-collision with a speeding car, and the driver's maneuvers to avoid a wreck result in a flat tire. Matt volunteers to help the driver change the tire, and that's when things really start going to hell for the shuttle's unlucky passengers.
When I refer to David Schwimmer'sRun Fatboy Run as "a modern-day screwball farce," that's a nice way of saying it's outrageously predictable, unabashedly sappy, and completely formulaic through and through. You know where the movie is going from frame one, and it sure doesn't take a lot of detours getting there. But the phrase "screwball" probably wouldn't have come to mind if Run Fatboy Run wasn't at least a little bit funny. Which it is. So if you don't mind an amiable-yet-seriously familiar 90 minutes -- and you're a big fan of British actor Simon Pegg -- I'd have no problem recommending the flick. Even if I'd never come close to calling it something brilliant.
The effortlessly likable Simon Pegg stars as one of those lovably lazy sad-sack types that you only come across in comedic films: Despite the fact that he left his pregnant fiancee (Thandie Newton) at the altar five years earlier, Pegg's "Dennis" is one of those losers we love to root for. (How a doofus like this ever scored a catch like Thandie Newton -- and then abandoned her! -- is one of the film's sillier conceits.) So when his former flame's smarmy new boyfriend (Hank Azaria) mentions that he'll be running in an upcoming marathon, Dennis senses a shot at redemption.
Earlier today I sat in on the Fact or Fiction panel. Panelists included Sean Farnel from Hot Docs, director Ron Mass (Grass), Karim Ahmad (Programming, ITVS), Evan Shapiro, GM Exec VP for IFC TV, director Mike Akel (Chalk), and Jared Moshe (president of Sidetrack Films). The subject of the panel was "the blurring of lines between fiction and non-fiction filmmaking, and what that means for the artform as a whole." You never know how it's gonna go with these film fest panels -- they can be dry as two-day-old toast, or they can be quite interesting. This one, thankfully, was mostly the latter.
Akel talked about making Chalk, which some people are surprised to learn is NOT a documentary. He discussed the challenges of using both actors and non-actors for the film, and how sometimes the non-actors didn't realize how funny they were. In particular, he wanted to avoid a Borat-esque "Candid Camera" vibe in his filmmaking. He also noted that audience members didn't seem to get that Chalk was not a documentary, and that at the film's first screenings they realized that the audience was getting so involved with the plight of the first year teacher who was the main character, that they were missing the humor of the film.
I finally got into Austin last night just in time to retrieve my badge before the registration desk closed. Funny how a seven-hour drive seems a lot shorter looking at the Mapquest directions than it does when you're actually driving it. I made it to my first film of the fest last night, 21, starring Jim Sturgess, Kevin Spacey and Lawrence Fishbourne. We'll have a review up of that one soonish, for now I'll just say that it was a largely uneven and not terribly original film, but I enjoyed the performances by Sturgess and Spacey.
The film is based on a true story of six MIT students who are trained by a professor to count cards, and who take Las Vegas casinos for millions before things go badly. Sturgess manages to hold onto an American accent for most of the film, and he's very cute and charming. Spacey turns in his usual reliable performance as the cynical hardass; it's the kind of role he could play in his sleep, but he does a decent job with it.
After the screening we stopped by the SXSW Opening Night Party at Buffalo Billiards. Yummy snacks, an open bar and dance music were keeping things hopping, but after the drive, I was in need of more sustenance, so Eric Snider and I headed with Oxford Film Fest's Melanie Addington over to Taco Cabana, a great little 24/7 taco spot. Whoever thought up the idea of a 24-hour taco place should get some kind of medal. It was surprisingly hopping for 2AM, so apparently lots of other folks dig the idea too.
On the morning of March 9, when we were at SXSW, I met a fellow involved with the short film Glory at Sea. He was sitting in the lobby of the Ramada Inn where I was staying, and he was dazed and confused because he'd just been involved in a terrible car accident on the way to their film's premiere with some fellow crew members, including director Benh Zeitlin, who, as we spoke, was in emergency surgery for a shattered hip bone and broken pelvis. Zeitlin is recovering from his injuries, thankfully, but he had no medical insurance, and is facing tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills and lost work time as he recovers.
