We’re not going to start posting reviews of SXSW films until the week of the festival, but having already seen several via screeners, I can promise you that when the time comes I’ll have much, much more to say about Barry Jenkins’ Medicine for Melancholy. A beautifully shot examination of 24 hours in the lives of a boy and girl who hook up at a party in San Francisco, Jenkins’ film has already been compared to certain other handmade movies about the personal dramas of lost urban youth. But Melancholy is politically engaged and formally ambitious in ways that films of this budget level often are not. More than a relationship drama, it’s a portrait of the city in which its set, a grafting of tentative romance onto the city’s very real, very rocky terrain of race, class and cultural conflict.
Above, you’ll find the Medicine for Melancholy trailer; below, Barry Jenkins answers the 4 Questions We’re Asking Everybody. The film premieres at 2:30pm on Sunday, March 9, at the SXSW Film Festival.
Tell us about your movie. Who did you work with, why did you make it? Give us the reductive, 25-word or less, “It’s like [pop culture reference a] meets [pop culture reference b]!” pitch, then explain what the quick and dirty sell leaves out.
“It’s like Before Sunset meets Do The Right Thing…with a dash of the French New Wave to sweeten the pot.” And yes…I know that makes no sense.
I’ve never considered doing the “It’s like this meets that” game with this film, but looking at the descriptor above I must admit, that pretty much sums it up. Two strangers meet and spend the day together following a random romantic liaison (Before Sunset) while pondering the shifting dynamics of place and identity as it directly relates to their locale (Do The Right Thing). The New Wave references are a bit more obtuse, but…they’re there 
It had been quite some time since I’d made my last film—my undergraduate thesis short for film school—and I’d just been through a crushing breakup when I sat down to write the film. I needed direction and an outlet, and making a film seemed the best way to satisfy both. You go four years without doing something and you begin to doubt your abilities. For me, this film is as much a gut check as an artistic endeavor.
The entire crew, all seven of us including the editor and save the sound guy, are graduates of the film school at Florida State. We made this fast and I mean FAST: production ended November 15th and we were sending screeners to festivals by December 27th. Making a movie that quickly is like dancing to a kick ass song: sound coalesces to a hum, vision blurs, the slipping of time, and then…it’s done.
Do you have a day job/a non-filmmaking occupation that raises money for your filmmaking efforts? Tell us about it.
I work at the second largest Banana Republic in the world. Beat that! I’m the shipment lead, which means at 5:30 in the morning I meet a truck in an alley off Union Square and direct a crew through the unloading and unpacking of hundreds of boxes. The pay is nominal, not nearly enough to make rent let alone fund films, but I’m off by 2:00 PM and free to hit up coffee shops to write during the mid-day lull. The people I work with at Banana are some of the most interesting I’ve ever met. A few are in the film, actually.
Justin Barber, my friend and producer, has a much more appropriate answer to this question: he’s a visual effects artist specializing in DVD featurettes for some of Hollywood’s biggest productions. He funded the film almost basically by himself. Were it not for the DVD extras of Ocean’s 13, Medicine For Melancholy would not exist.
Have you been to SXSW before? If so, tell us about your funniest story from the experience. If not, what are you looking forward to re: the festival and/or the city of Austin?
Never been to Austin. Never spent time in Texas. Extremely excited about screening the film before a public audience. American independent cinema is at a strange juncture. While it seems everyone and their cousin is making feature films, the numbers are still quite low and the filmmakers are spread across the country. Gathering filmmakers from all over in one place for the sake of celebrating cinema without the pretensions of supposed high art is what stands out to me about SXSW. The notion that, aesthetically, everything is valid. I’m excited to be apart of it.
There’s also the barbecue.
Let’s get hypothetical: You’re on death row. The night of your execution, you’re allowed to watch any two films of your choice. What would you pick for your last-night-on-Earth double feature?
Death row? Damn! It’s only been three questions!
Okay, given what lies at the other side of this screening, my first choice would be Bela Tarr’s Satantango. It’s seven and a half hours, which will go a long way towards delaying the chair. This being my dying wish, I’d hold out for a film print…projected on my cell ceiling, of course. Have always wanted to watch a film on my back. The other would be Niki Karimi’s A Few Days Later. I can’t get this film out of my head. It’s as simple as that.
