south by southwest Tagged Articles at Cinematical

So you wanna rake in the indie cred in Austin at next year's South by Southwest Festival? You have a skootch more than a week left to submit proposals for panels and/or rate the ones that have already been submitted for SXSW. But lucky for you, the SXSW Panel Picker is at your fingertips any time of the day or night. This cool new tool allows for everyone to have a say in what panels get okay'd for the festival.

According to the official site, "SXSW thrives on the creative intersection that takes place when great minds get together, and we feel the Panel Picker truly celebrates that. We believe that the real experts at SXSW are the people who bring the event to life - you, the thousands of people who attend every year. You know what you want to see, so this is your chance to help make that happen."

Previous panels include "The Incredible Shrinking (Expanding?) Film Critic Profession," which featured Cinematical's very own Scott Weinberg, "From Script to Screen," a Stanley Kubrick discussion, and much more. Get on your horse and head over 'cause the Panel Picker closes its doors on July 10th.

You can also stay up to date on all the latest SXSW-related film news and reviews over at the official blog. They gave Erik Davis' earlier post on the real girl behind SXSW's indie hit 500 Days of Summer a nice shout out, too. Even if you don't get your very own panel, you should do yourself a favor and hit up the festival since it's filled to the gills with enough media to burn your retinas and pop your eardrums. Plus, you can eat some BBQ with the peeps you Tweet at. Hey, just sayin'.

Documentary filmmakers and the elderly don't always mix well. As a corollary to the "profane grandma" phenomenon, documentarians face the overwhelming temptation to make senior citizens doddering and cute – to prod us to laugh at them. The nadir of this trend might be Young@Heart, last year's minor hit about a choir of seniors who perform modern pop hits for adoring crowds, where the director spent the film's entire running time treating people fully twice his age like toddlers. It's insulting.

So I was a bit concerned about The Way We Get By, a doc about a group of senior citizens in Bangor, Maine ("where Stephen King lives") who spend their time greeting and sending off the stream of American troops who parade through Bangor Airport on their way to and from Iraq and Afghanistan. The greeters are constantly on call, and often end up shuffling off to the airport in the middle of the night; they shake hands and give hugs and shout teary "thank you"s and "welcome home"s. I feared the worst: "They're old and their lives are empty, but look how adorable they are!" But The Way We Get By turns out to be a lovely, uncondescending look at three lives enriched by kindness.

Cinematical has just received this exclusive clip from Sorry, Thanks, which will enjoy its premiere this month at the South By Southwest Film Festival. Directed by Dia Sokol, Sorry, Thanks stars our man Wiley Wiggins (Dazed and Confused) as a guy who has a one-night-stand while in a committed relationship ... and all the fun, complicated stuff that arises from that one encounter. The film also stars Kenya Miles and Andrew Bujalski.

I've seen Sorry, Thanks, and can vouch for its cute, awkward humor -- but I'll also note that Wiggins totally steals the show. Why he's not doing more, I do not know; count me as someone who'd love to see Wiggins pop up on the big screen at least a thousand times per year. But anyway, yeah, check out the clip below (which comes from one of my favorite scenes of the film).

CLICK HERE TO WATCH EXCLUSIVE CLIP

Sorry, Thanks is set to take SXSW by storm on the following dates:

Saturday, MARCH 14th / 11:30 AM
ALAMO RITZ 1 Theater

Sunday, MARCH 15th / 7:30 PM
ALAMO LAMAR 3 Theater

Thursday, MARCH 19th / 9:00 PM
ALAMO LAMAR 3 Theater

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OK, this topic might only interest a few movie nerds, but that includes me, so I'm writing it.

Most people know that to be eligible for Academy Award consideration, a film must play theatrically for at least a week somewhere in Los Angeles County within the calendar year. But what about short films? There are categories for those at the Oscars (usually announced coincidental with the viewing audience's bathroom breaks), but surely those little live-action and animated flicks didn't play theatrically somewhere. I mean, when do you ever see short films in a theater other than in front of the new Pixar movie?

The answer, which you can read for yourself in the Academy's rules, is that for short films, they either have to play theatrically (for three consecutive days, at least twice a day), OR win a best-in-category award at an Academy-approved film festival. And that makes a lot of sense -- the only way most of us ever see shorts at all is at film festivals.

So which festivals "count" for Academy purposes? I'm glad you asked, because it brings us to the reason for this post. The current list of approved festivals is here, and it has the usual suspects -- Toronto, Sundance, Venice, Cannes, Berlin, etc. -- plus about 60 others all over the world. And the news that's a semi-big-deal for our friends in Austin is that our beloved South By Southwest Film Festival has just been approved as an addition to that list. From now on, any short film winning the top prize at SXSW is eligible for Oscar consideration. SXSW is legit now!

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.

[via Filmmaker ]

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.