A Texas-based film was the big winner at this year's South By Southwest film festival.
"Natural Selection," shot in Smithville with a Texas crew, won a total of six awards, including the Grand Jury Prize and the audience pick for Best Narrative Feature. The movie is a dark comedy about a woman who goes searching for answers when she finds her husband's been keeping secrets from her. Robbie Pickering, the film's writer and director, said that while the film's not based on real events, he did draw from experience:
"There are a lot of things that I put in there that were my own kind of issues that I think was dealing with subconsciously. And my own ideas about what I saw around be growing up, and what I see around me now, and what I saw around me at the moment when I wrote it, which was when my stepfather was dying, so it's only after years in therapy that I look back on that stuff and see all these things [in the movie]."
"Natural Selection" was also awarded Best Screenplay, Best Editing, and Best Score. Its two stars, Rachael Harris and Matt O'Leary, were singled out by the jury for Breakthrough Performances.
The audience chose "Kumare" as the Best Documentary of the festival. In the film, director Vikram Gandhi pretends to be a guru to a small group of followers as a social experiment.
"I knew that we wanted to go into places that we hadn't seen in a film like this before, and I also knew that we wanted to not do anything mean-spirited and really just keep everything positive. But because of the fact that I would unveil at the end, it meant that I really wanted to be aware of what people were thinking and explain what Vikram believes through Kumaré."
Awards also went to Texans Julie Gould and Daniel Laabs for their short film, "8," and North Texas teen Chad Werner, whose untitled film won Best High School Short. The Louis Black Lone Star Award went to "INCENDIARY: The Willingham Case," about a death row execution carried out on a man that some say was innocent of the crime.
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