SXSW 2012: Deirdre Saravia's take

An Observation
By Deirdre Saravia

Practice makes perfect, and on my fifth visit to Austin’s South By Southwest music festival (SXSW), this was certainly the case.

The event is gigantic, with masses of people hurrying and scurrying, and all appearing to know where they’re going.

Driving into Austin from San Antonio flows smoothly until you see the Holiday Inn hotel on your left. From there on, cars inch along until finally you leave the highway. Traffic is moving, but part of the reason for that is that there’s nowhere to stop and park. So, last week I spotted a hotel parking lot, paid the fee and escaped the car. The Convention Center was right around the corner. No hunting around for a street parking slot this time around!

Registration for badge holders takes place in the Convention Center. Once again, I encountered a tsunami of people, but all was amazingly quiet and organized. Volunteers are strategically placed everywhere, and love to be questioned. They are there to make your visit is as good as it can be.

Despite long lines of registrants, we processed rapidly and were issued our rectangular press passes, complete with photo ID. These are hung around the neck and clearly identify you as a bona fide professional, musician, or someone with a lot of money. You need these badges to access many sites at SXSW, although there are many free and open to the public events going on simultaneously.

The weather in Austin can be an issue, last year was freezing and raining, and for bands hauling around masses of instruments, the weather was somewhat daunting. However, another year the temperatures soared into the triple digits and that was even worse. This year was warm and cloudy, no complaints.

If you’re unfamiliar with Austin, it is difficult to anticipate distances, and time especially if you’re on the wrong side of IH 35, so finding artists and places to interview can be tricky. Fortunately, the organizers of SXSW alleviate this conundrum, by allocating interview rooms close to the Convention Center. So this means that efficiency is the name of the game, and everyone’s happy.

The performers come to SXSW from around the globe, and for many of them, at their own personal expense.

For these modern day troubadours, it appears that ‘depending on the kindness of strangers’ for a bed is an absolute necessity. Indeed, a bed would be a luxury—many settle for floor space.

Despite the discomfort, these young--and they are mostly really young—musicians are happy, excited and open to the great adventure of SXSW.

I saw two pairs of artists from central Europe who bumped into each other in the Convention Center line. They became instant friends and were planning to spend the evening together. They were unrepresented by any agent or PR person, and I was so happy that they found each other.

For the third year in a row I interviewed Marianne Dissard, and I look forward to seeing her each year. Born in France, now living in Tucson, she writes very poignantly about some very personal subjects. Dissard is a dynamic and creative young woman who appears to be fearless. She travels around the world, often alone, and finds inspiration everywhere.

I guess the one thing that strikes me so intensely, is that these young people from enormously diverse cultures share such love of life and respect for each other. They are open to different points of view, not just open but embracing the difference between us.
The world will be just fine with our future generations as found at SXSW taking over the reins of power.

Finally a comment on the fashion scene--after all, SXSW now has a daily fashion show!
Last year, many young men were seen in pants so tight they appeared to have been sprayed on. This is not a good look for anyone, and most definitely, not for those with a few extra pounds.

This year the trend for females appeared to be non existent skirts, skirts so short accompanied by enormously high heels, the entire ensemble appeared painful to wear.

Perhaps they were part of performance group, but it just seemed to me that there were an awful lot of them.

SXSW 2012: Micah Magee, "Heimkommen"

Micah Magee, originally from San Antonio, Texas, got started as a filmmaker relatively late in life, at age 19. “People nowadays start making films when they’re four with their phones,” she jokes.

One of her first projects as a UT-Austin student, shot on Hi8, was screened at South By Southwest years ago. Now based out of Germany, Magee is back at SXSW with “Heimkommen (Coming Home),” a story about two siblings dealing with grief and loss in very different ways.

Magee says she and her writing partner, Magdalena Grazewicz, “both had experiences of losing people... and not necessarily coping with it in a way that was appropriate.” They drew upon themselves for the character of Robert, who blames his younger sister for the death of his girlfriend, Jo.

“Filmmaking is a lot like writing, and it just happens to be how I write best,” Magee says. “Because you can use images, and feelings... in a direct way.”

To carry that across, Magee shot her short film “Heimkommen” in 35mm, rather than the digital format that is so popular among independent filmmakers these days. “I like the discipline of shooting on film,” she begins, adding that “because the film is about relationships between people, it was important for me to be able to have a long or short focus and be very specific about that.”

Her first trip as a student filmmaker at SXSW was a whirlwind, and a bit overwhelming. “I’m looking forward to seeing what [the festival] is like now that I’m more adult. [Back then], I just wanted to run away because there were so many people, and everybody was like ‘Do you want to sell your film online?’ and I didn’t know what to do!” she laughs. “So I just sort of watched movies, but I didn’t talk to anyone then. It’ll be nice to be a little more self-confident and try talking to people about my film.”

Magee plans to move back to San Antonio in 2012 and shoot her next film, a hybrid documentary and narrative, in the Alamo City.

“Heimkommen” screens on Monday, March 12 at 1:45pm (Alamo Drafthouse Lamar) and Wednesday, March 14 at 3:00 pm (Alamo Drafthouse Ritz) as part of the Narrative Shorts program at SXSW 2012.

You can hear my full interview with Micah Magee here: http://audio.tpr.org/sxsw12-micah.mp3

SXSW 2012: Alex Villanueva, "Drum Roll Please"

Alex Villanueva says he was surprised when his short film, “Drum Roll Please,” was accepted into this year’s South By Southwest film festival.

“I actually submitted two of my films,” he says. “I almost feel more proud of the other one [that didn’t get in], but showcasing this one definitely makes me feel happy.”

Villanueva says the film was largely improvised on the spot. Friends of his had written a mumbahton song that rhythmically repeats the word “hands.” Villanueva starting thinking about the word, and the way humans have opposable thumbs as opposed to, say…. a bear, or a wolf.

For the shoot, Villanueva brought along some fuzzy caps with animal designs, and the resulting comedic short is a man vs. beast story with an explosive finale.

Villanueva, a senior at North East School of the Arts, will be going to college next year, and majoring in mathematics or actuarial science. Seeing his film get into South By Southwest made him regret not applying to film school. But he still sees film being a big part of his future for a long time to come.

Hear Villanueva's full interview with TPR's Nathan Cone here: http://audio.tpr.org/sxsw12-alex.mp3

SXSW 2012: Maqui Gaona, "Burn Spark"

Senior Maqui Gaona is enrolled in the Digital Video program at St. Mary’s Hall. Her film “Burn Spark” will screen as part of the Texas High School Shorts program at SXSW this week. The short film is set in a world where people are programmed to fall in love with only one other person.

“I kind of got the idea from lots of different interpretations of what it means to instantly connect with someone,” she says.

To add the sci-fi twist, Gaona says she was inspired by the movie “Minority Report.” She wanted to explore the idea of modernizing love, making it more mechanical and pre-destined.

Does Gaona believe in romanitic destiny herself? “I do believe that you can bond and make great relationships with multiple people,” she says. “But there’ll definitely be that one person that you make a better connection with above anyone else.”

“Burn Spark” screens on Saturday, March 10 and Sunday, March 17 as part of the Texas High School Shorts program at SXSW.

Hear Maqui Gaona and TPR's Nathan Cone in conversation here: http://audio.tpr.org/sxsw12-maqui.mp3

SXSW Wrap-Up, Part 2

Here's the second of two entries reviewing films from the 2011 SXSW Film Festival.

--Nathan Cone

******

Small, Beautifully Moving Parts

A technologically-obsessed young woman has to deal with decidedly analog feelings in “Small, Beautifully Moving Parts,” a wonderfully acted film, led by Austin resident Anna Margaret Hollyman as Sarah Sparks.

Spun off from a Sundance Channel web series, “Small, Beautifully Moving Parts” finds techno-geek Sarah Sparks pregnant and in a loving relationship, but unsure of how she feels about her impending motherhood. “We wanted the humor of her being more excited about the ultrasound machinery than the actual thing being ultrasounded,” director Lisa Robinson told me.

A baby shower in the film becomes emotionally overwhelming; I’m a man, and even I could relate to that scene. Afterward, Sarah goes searching for a mother who she’s been estranged from for years. That’s the plot in a nutshell, but the film is full of quietly beautiful moments, such as Sarah visiting her father, who’s also somewhat humorously using technology to help his own love life. “Small, Beautifully Moving Parts” is a good film with great empathy for its characters.

Win Win Director Todd McCarthy’s third film, following “The Station Agent” and the brilliant “The Visitor,” is a sneaky little film that only later leaves you realizing how talented its stars are. Paul Giamatti plays a small-town lawyer and volunteer wrestling coach that finds himself in a position one day to make a decision that may not be ethically right, but will ultimately benefit him and those around him. But the repercussions of that choice come back to bite him later.

Amy Ryan is in the supporting role of Giamatti’s wife, and Jeffrey Tambor gets laughs with just a look. “Win Win” is an actor’s picture, and it’s a joy to watch these folks in action; they make what would normally be an uneventful plot into something special.

Beats of Freedom The more I learn about Poland, the more it seems that you can point to that much-abused Eastern bloc country as an important catalyst in the fall of Communism. The documentary “Beats of Freedom” recounts the Polish rock scene from the 1970s and 1980s, its relationship to the Solidarity movement, and its role in taking down the establishment. Groups profiled include Manaam, Brygada Kryzys (Crisis Brigade), and Tilt. Highlights include the story of how the establishment tacitly condoned the Jarocin Music Festival for years, because it supposedly kept youth happy and out of trouble. The thing is, no one over the age of 30 understood the subversive lyrics that the bands were singing, but the kids knew. This documentary is a fascinating look at recent rock history, and even better, the music is really, really good. If you love rock music, find “Beats of Freedom” and see it. This was one of my favorite films at the festival.

Five Time Champion

Shot on a small budget in Smithville, Texas, “Five Time Champion” is about young scientist Julius (Ryan Akin) and his tentative experiments with love and sex. Simultaneously, the film follows several adults as they embark on the same quest, and it’s interesting to see how director Berndt Mader shows how the concept of love evolves over the course of our lives.

Jon Gries is terrific in the film as a high school coach wooing Julius’s mother. He’s set up to be the antagonist in the film, but I left the movie feeling some sympathy for his character. It’s a terrific part, written well, and Gries delivers.

Something Ventured

Co-directors Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller (“Ballets Russes”) chronicle the early history of companies like Apple, Intel, Cisco, and Genentech in their documentary “Something Ventured.” The movie has little narrative arc to it, focusing instead on telling each company’s story, but tying the film together are the half dozen or so venture capitalists interviewed for the picture, all of whom not only had the business acumen to get these start-up companies off the ground, but to groom their often untrained founders and entrepreneurs into successful businessmen and women of their own. As a fan of Atari since childhood, I geeked out at seeing Nolan Bushnell on screen, and marveled at how he struggled to sell the arcade game concept to investors. Even if the film seems somewhat devoid of conflicting views (save for the story of Cisco Systems), it’s a fascinating document of recent tech history.

Taken By Storm

If you own albums by Peter Gabriel, Pink Floyd, Montrose, UFO, the Mars Volta, or… or… the list goes on and on, chances are you’re familiar with the photography and design of Storm Thorgerson, and, working with his partner Aubrey Powell, the design firm Hipgnosis. Early on in “Taken By Storm,” a documentary about Thorgerson and his work, he’s called one of the “last great surrealists.” Certainly much of Thorgerson’s work falls into that category; his images are often characterized by ordinary people placed in unusual settings, such as the famous “burning handshake” cover of Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here,” or the smiling family adoring a miniature monolith on the cover or Led Zeppelin’s “Presence.”

Thorgerson himself seems a genial old man in the documentary “Taken By Storm,” one who pours his heart and money into his work. Robert Plant (Led Zeppelin), David Gilmour (Pink Floyd), Peter Gabriel, and members of the Mars Volta and the Cranberries all describe their experience working with the perfectionist in a bemused but admiring manner. Mr. Thorgerson shares his inspiration for some of his most iconic images, but I kept wanting to learn a little more about the ideas that drive him to create such memorable images. And though I suspect it’s probably a money issue (i.e. not enough funds for an independent film to license), I wanted to hear more music by the bands that Thorgerson designed album covers for.

--Nathan Cone

SXSW Film Wrap-Up, Part 1

After taking the fire-hose of film that is the South by Southwest Film Festival in mid-March, I like to wait a few weeks before writing down thoughts about the movies I've seen. At a festival, it's easy to get caught up in the enthusiasm of the event; sometimes the critical mind gets dialed back a bit. Here are some of my thoughts on the films I saw at this year's SXSW Film Festival. Enjoy!

Natural Selection

The audience and critics’ favorite at this year’s South By Southwest Film Festival, “Natural Selection” is a dark comedy about a woman, Linda, (Rachael Harris) who goes searching for answers when she finds her husband's been keeping secrets from her — including fathering a son, Raymond (Matt O’Leary).

Since much of the plot is given over to Raymond and Linda’s road trip back to Texas from Florida, Harris and O’Leary have to carry the film on their shoulders. They do so with two terrific performances. O’Leary, as Raymond, has to first break through the junkie stereotype character, and then make us care about his personal growth. And as Linda, Rachael Harris uses her character's guilt as a motivating factor, carrying us through all manner of implausible predicaments to some sense of peace.

As a side note, “Natural Selection” features characters who are very religious. There’s some humor in the movie that stems from religion, but I found it refreshing that their beliefs were truly taken seriously by the film.

Kumaré

A few years ago, Vikram Gandhi began work on a documentary about the yoga industry, but the more he learned, the more interested he became in the gurus that people follow. Gandhi began to wonder just what people believed in, and decided to find out from the inside. Gandhi grew out his hair and beard, dressed in flowing robes, moved to Phoenix, and added an “e” to his middle name to become “Kumaré.”

After a few weeks in Phoenix, Kumaré develops a core group of followers, who begin to open up their lives to him. When Kumaré finally “unveils” to them his true identity, the results are surprisingly emotional.

Although Kumaré won an audience award as Best Documentary at this year’s South by Southwest festival, and I loved the film, buzz I’ve read online since, and the questions it raised at screenings during the festival, demonstrated its very premise to be quite polarizing. Some folks felt Gandhi was cheating or hurting the people that followed “Kumaré,” and others have said it was downright dangerous for him to play with these poor souls’ heads.

Gandhi may or may not have realized what he was getting into when he began his experiment, but I think by the end of the film, it’s clear that the whole Kumaré persona has become very important to him, and he’s developed a real attachment to Kumaré’s followers. Some have written that Gandhi had no training to be a counselor. But isn’t that one of the points of this film? Regardless of whether he’s a licensed counselor, it’s clear that as Kumaré -- and as Vikram Gandhi -- he did his best to be a good friend.

F#$k My Life The unfortunately titled Chilean film “F#$k My Life” stars Ariel Levy as Javier, a party guy that falls in love with Sofia, a beautiful singer who’s normally way out of his league. The two date for a while, and then Javier inexplicably breaks it off with Sophia, then spends months and months trying to get her back in ways that would normally lead to a restraining order in the United States. Plus, Javier is a major jerk. He makes sexist remarks, he drinks too much, he doesn’t really care about anyone other than himself, and he’s about as deep as a kiddie pool. It’s a wonder his childhood friend, Angela, even continues to hang out with him. And when, at the end of the film, the two of them get together after Javier’s spent the entire film chasing other skirts in front of her, I wondered what planet these folks live on. The film tries to make some sort of statement about love in the digital age, and the impossibility of separating yourself from an ex when they're all over Facebook, Twitter, etc., but all of that is overshadowed by Javier's unlikeability. I will say that the film is nicely photographed, though. Santiago, Chile, looks great.

Hesher

Star Rainn Wilson described “Hesher” to me as a “dark comedy, with less emphasis on the comedy.” That’s pretty apt, I’d say, but it makes what I think should be funny moments in the film less funny, and more just... uncomfortable. Young Devin Brochu stars as T.J., who, along with his father, is dealing with the recent death of his mother. Dad (Wilson) does so by popping pills and lazing about on the couch for most of the picture. T.J. is a good kid, but he’s getting picked on by a bully at school, and that’s been getting him into trouble.

From out of a haze of smoke one day comes Hesher (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who drives around all day in his good times van blasting Metallica and smoking like a chimney. Hesher takes it upon himself to mentor T.J. in the ways of breaking and entering, vandalism, and blowing up the local bully’s convertible. When young T.J. finally takes a pair of garden shears and threatens to cut off the bully’s toe, I wondered if I just wasn’t getting it. It sounds like a hopelessly square thing to say, but Hesher is a bad influence on T.J. He needed to kick his dad’s ass in gear, not the kid’s.

Natalie Portman has a role in the film as T.J.’s prepubescent crush, and does well with what she’s been given. She goes frump for the part, wearing oversize glasses and a low-rent grocery clerk’s outfit.

After premiering at Sundance in early 2010, “Hesher” will finally see wide release in May, 2011.

Inside America

I don’t feel quite right giving this film a review since I had to duck out about 15 minutes before its conclusion to get to a scheduled interview. But I was interested in seeing "Inside America" because its director, Barbara Eder, was born in Austria and spent much of 1994 as an exchange student in Brownsville, Texas. She based much of "Inside America" on her observations of Rio Grande Valley life, and the film was shot on location at Hanna High School.

There’s some nice cinema verité slice-of-life filmmaking going on here, but "Inside America" brings little new to the table dramatically. At the high school, there are the rival gangs, the ROTC kids, the popular girl that hides a drug problem, the good girl mixed up with the wrong group that we’re supposed to identify with, the meek white kid that buys a gun one day...

Like I said, I had to leave the film early. I hope it turned a corner in the last 15 minutes, but for the most part, "Inside America" feels like something we've seen before.

******

More to come!

--Nathan Cone

SXSW: Afghan Girls Drop Into Half-Pipes

"Skateistan," a documentary that screened in SXGlobal Shorts, is about an emerging skateboarding school, Afghanistan’s first, which is dedicated to teaching both male and female students. Each week over 280 students make their way to the Afghan National Olympic Grounds to spend two hours at Skateistan. Each student attends class once a week to earn time skateboarding in a skatepark assembled by aid workers. View the full film here.

TPR Cinema's Nathan Cone Interviews Director Vikram Gandhi on His Documentary 'Kumaré'

Texas Public Radio's Nathan Cone interviews Vikram Ghandi, director of the 2011 SXSW Film Awards-winner for Best Documentary. Click here for Texas Public Radio's SXSW coverage.

SXSW: FUTURESTATES

One of the special events at SXSW was the screening of the second season of FUTURESTATES, a collection of 10 fictional shorts that depict futuristic stories through the lens of today's global realities. Acclaimed indie filmmakers touch on a range of social issues that include LGBT civil rights, urban planning, and climate change. A public media project, FUTURESTATES is funded by the Corporation from Public Broadcasting and produced by the Independent Television Service.

Last year, the season launched with Ramin Bahrani’s “Plastic Bag,” narrated by Werner Herzog. This season opens with Nisha Ganatra’s “Beholder.” Starring Jessica Paré (of “Mad Men”), “Beholder” takes place in a gated community with a clinic where patients genetically engineer their children.

FUTURESTATES is available for free via streaming video on futurestates.tv. Each week, a new short from the collection is released.

A Few Mindblowing Highlights of SXSW Interactive Award Winners

The SXSW Interactive Awards are like any film or music award show in that the list of winners encapsulate the year's greatest hits and profound experiences in the industry.

Among the award winners announced Tuesday evening, here are a few highlights. If you're fuzzy on the term "interactive," these creative and engaging sites will surely enlighten you.

Interactive Award for Art: The Johnny Cash Project. "From traditional photography to non-traditional performances, this category focuses on web-based collections of life, society and culture." The Johnny Cash Project is global collective art project orchestrated by music video director Chris Milk with the collaboration of the Cash estate, Rick Rubin, Aaron Koblin, and Radical Media. Participants all over the world contribute drawings of Cash. By uploading their portraits to the website, they further develop a living portrait of the Man in Black that is featured in a music video for his song "Ain't No Grave."




Chris Milk is also the creator behind the "The Wilderness Downtown," the winner of the Interactive Award for Music. The music category pertains to "projects related to musicians, bands,and the music industry, as well online radio and other destinations that offer streaming audio content." Built in HTML5 and made with Google to highlight their Chrome browser, "The Wilderness Downtown" is an interactive music video featuring Google Earth and the Arcade Fire song "We Used to Wait."


The Interactive Award for Film/ TV went to "Collapsus: The Energy Risk Conspiracy" by Houston-born director Tommy Pallotta, a frequent collaborator of Richard Linklater. "Collapsus" is a transmedia story -- transmedia refers to muliple-platform storytelling -- that combines interactivity, animation, fiction, and documentary. Following the adventures of four characters, you are lead into a world of conspiracy, treason and failing energy supplies. Pallotta's video walk-through here is the most engaging and thrilling explanation of the project.

Collapsus Walkthrough from SubmarineChannel on Vimeo.

The Interactive Award for Experimental applies to "cutting-edge and trend-setting destinations that are pushing the envelope and challenging our perceptions of the web." London-based Jim Hall describes his winning "Isle of Tune" as a "playful music sequencer toy type thing." For semi-experienced gamers, there is a familiarity to "SimCity." In "The Isle of Tune," users create road layouts that play tunes using houses, trees, cars, and the like. Tunes can then be shared on Facebook and Twitter. The interface is beginner-friendly; you just have to allow yourself some playtime and take a creative leap from how you generally use the web. In this video, a player created an "Isle of Tune" version of Michael Jackson's song "Beat It."

"Natural Selection" cleans up at SXSW

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.

SXSW: Our Future Stars in "The City Dark"

In 2008, for the first time in the history of mankind, the number of people living in urban areas eclipsed the number of those living in rural areas. This got filmmaker Ian Cheney thinking about the stars, and light pollution. He began with a simple question, “Why do we need the stars?” His ensuing documentary “The City Dark” is a poetic exposition of the disappearing night sky, increasingly illuminated by the cities of the world.

Cheney, best known for his documentary “King Corn,” is based in Brooklyn, but he grew up in rural Maine and spent his boyhood as an amateur astronomer, attending astronomy camps and building his own telescope. His approach to the topic is ambivalent, full of affection for both the stunning starry sky of his youth and the emerging “glittery globe.”

In six chapters, with an eclectic cast of scientists, philosophers (including Ann Druyan, co-writer of "Cosmos" and wife of the late Carl Sagan), historians and lighting designers, the film weaves together cutting-edge science with personal, meditative sequences reflecting on the human relationship to the sky. Astronomers in Hawaii track the threat of killer asteroids, and their work is increasingly more difficult through the thickening fog of light pollution. Biologists along the Florida coast trace the death of thousands of hatching sea turtles due to their disorientation by Miami’s lights. A generation of kids in places like the Bronx grows up with only a dozen stars and a vague notion of the Milky Way and the universe.

“The City Dark” strives for a balance of light and dark, and throughout the film is a refrain best articulated by Neil deGrasse Tyson, the Queens-born astrophysicist (you might recognize him from “The Colbert Report”): “When you look at the night sky, you realize how small we are within the cosmos. It’s kind of a resetting of your ego. To deny yourself of that state of mind, either willingly or unwittingly…is to not live to the full extent of what it is to be human.”

The documentary premiered at SXSW, and it will screen again Friday, March 18, 4:30 at Alamo Lamar South. This is certainly a film best experienced in the theater — or an observatory.

SXSW: the Trinity

At SXSW, the geeks open the show and the musicians close it. The filmmakers are the second act or the meat between the bread — depending on your alliance. From March 11 through March 19, once you get over the scene and spectacle, SXSW is the nexus for brains, beauty, and brilliance with people who have money, and more importantly, people who are resourceful.

Interactive and film opened this year’s conference last Friday. If you’re unfamiliar or vague about the meaning of "interactive," Ze Frank, a popular interactive performance artist, offers a history of SXSW Interactive in under a minute in this video (recorded in 2007). With over 200 panels and presentations, plus a trade show, the energy focuses on how creativity and new media are shaping the future — from emerging web designs and social media to interactive 3D cinema to music for mobile and video games.

Film runs from March 11 through Saturday, March 19. Like all great film festivals, the

internationally renowned — such the Oscar-winning "A Better World" and "Tabloid", the latest from Errol Morris — mix with the obscure, the emerging darlings, and the local quirk. After their festival circuit, some of these films you’ll see in theaters near you, some will stream on television, and some you’ll only see streaming on the Internet. Some, the international shorts, in particular, will only play at festivals. Plus, don't forget the Q&As with the filmmakers, cast, and crew after the films — often a surprising delight. Trailers and podcasts covering the film are on SXSW's site, and IFC.com is hosting a live feed.

While Music plays eternally in Austin, the official SXSW shows run March 15-19. NPR Music will stream live from SXSW, March 16 through 19. They’ll feature performances from acts such as Bright Eyes, Great Lake Swimmers and the Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger. If you can’t make it to a live performance, these live streams plus SXSW’s own podcasts and videos are the next best thing.

Music, film, interactive — it’s not any one tract of the trinity that gives the conference its pull; it’s the cross-pollination of all three. With the collaborations between the disciplines, the ideas exchanged in chats while waiting in lines or shuttling between venues, the whole is greater than the parts at SXSW.

Community activism is at the heart of it all. Case in point: SXSW launched on the same day Japan was shattered by earthquakes and a tsunami. In response, organizers have set up sxsw4japan.org, a fundraising site with the goal of raising $50,000 for the American Red Cross. In its third day, over 85% of the goal has been reached.

SXSW 2011, Post #1

As the South By Southwest (SXSW) Music-Film-Interactive Festival and Conference enters its 25th year, one thing is clear. This thing is bigger than ever. Roger Ebert, apparently in Austin for the first time, Tweeted on Saturday: “SXSW is huge! I knew it was a big deal, but I had no idea.”

The choices are many. The trade show floor is easily five times what it was when I attended my first SXSW in 2007. There are so many companies here hawking their apps and software, I’m beginning to wonder if we’re not entering another tech bubble.

I’ve spoken to a few peo

ple that are starting to feel the Interactive festival and the film parties that surround the festival are starting to overwhelm the movies themselves. Maybe for the industry and press folk, but the average movie fan still has plenty to discover at SXSW. I spoke to a couple from Austin that try to come to as many movies as they can -- they buy individual tickets to the films. I also ran into TPR members Sherry Heffner and Steve Sozanski. Sherry is spending the entire week in Austin, gorging on the firehose of movies that is SXSW Film.

I held myself to one interview and four features yesterday. Monday, it’s three movies and five interviews. One of the things I enjoy most about the festival is meeting the filmmakers behind the smaller, independent films that are here. For them, showing their film in front of an ap

preciative crowd is a treat in and of itself. If they’re lucky, a distributor may come knocking on their door.

One of the highlights

that is already generating some buzz at the festival is KUMARE, a documentary by Vikram Gandhi. Gandhi started out making a film about the yoga industry, but the more he learned, the more interested he became in the gurus that people follow. He started to wonder just what people believed in, and decided to find out from the inside. Gandhi grew out his hair and beard, dressed in flowing robes, moved to Phoenix, and added an “e” to his middle name to become “Kumare.” After a few weeks in Phoenix, Kumare develops a core group of followers, who being to open up their lives to him. When Kumare finally “unveils” to them, the results are surprisingly emotional. This was a wonderful film, and it has a real shot at winning an award this Tuesday night.

I’ll follow up this post with more on some of the other films I’ve seen, and we’ll be posting interviews online at TPR.ORG later this week.