Brant Sersen’s last film, the Rob Corddry-starring comedy Blackballed: The Bobby Dukes Story, won the audience award at SXSW 5 years back. His follow-up, Splinterheads, stars Rachael Taylor (top billed in the Washingtonienne pilot) and Lea Thompson (riding the heat of the recent resurgance of Howard the Duck), and is premiering at SXSW in Emerging Visions. Sersen answers The 5 Questions We Ask Everyone after the jump.

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Jody Lee Lipes, cinematographer of Antonio Campos‘ Afterschool, makes his feature length directorial debut with the SXSW Emerging Visions selection Brock Enright: Good Times Will Never Be the Same, a beautifully shot doc about an artist struggling to maintain a somewhat normal domestic relationship while producing a half-baked, largely inscrutable but still vaguely offensive installation for a New York gallery. Below the jump, check out the film’s trailer, as well as Lipes’ answers to The 5 Questions We Ask Everyone.

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Make out with Make-out with Violence

It’s rare that you Google the title of a film making its SXSW premiere in the Emerging Visions program, and discover a two year-old making of short, complete with impressively-looking underwater photography and 70s style voiceover, but the Deagol Brothers, the young minds behind Make-Out With Violence, seem hellbent on defying expectations. For one thing, unlike the Wilson, Duplass and Zellner Brothers who preceded them at SXSW, the Deagols aren’t real brothers; as their bio puts it, they’re “a collective of multimedia artists that strive for excellence in art and entertainment” who, “attracted by the communal aspect of film production, choose to not be credited as individuals.” We assume, then, that the above short outing the trio’s real names (we think?) will soon either be edited or made to disappear, so watch it while you can. Until then, the Brothers celebrate the communal aspect of film promoting by answering The 5 Questions We Ask Everyone in one voice, below the jump.

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As SXSW 2009 approaches we’ll be asking filmmakers to spill the superficial details about their films, to tell us all the deep personal details of what makes them tick, and –– new this year! –– reveal who they had to sleep with, in the incestuous conspiracy-minded secret society that is the wider SXSW community, in order to get their film programmed at the festival.

Today we take a look at Creative Nonfiction, an Emerging Visions entry from Lena Dunham, who you might remember from Brandon’s Media Diet interview back in January, which was pegged to the debut of her very funny and still ongoing web series, Delusional Downtown Divas. Answering The 5 Questions We Ask Everyone, Lena tells us about what 9 year old kids won’t let her get away with, and uses the phrase “boning Mark Ruffalo,” for which she has instantly won our hearts. The Nonfiction trailer is embedded above.

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As SXSW 2009 approaches we’ll be asking filmmakers to spill the superficial details about their films, to tell us all the deep personal details of what makes them tick, and –– new this year! –– reveal who they had to sleep with, in the incestuous conspiracy-minded secret society that is the wider SXSW community, in order to get their film programmed at the festival.

Disclosure time! David Lowery wrote a few reviews for us last year at SXSW. This year, he will not be writing for us, but he will be at the Festival representing his first feature, St. Nick. Workshopped last summer at the IFP Filmmaker Lab, the Emerging Visions entry follows “the adventures of a brother & sister trying to survive, all on their own, out on the plains of Texas.” David answers to The 5 Questions We’re Asking Everyone involve taking inspiration from Ernest Goes to Camp and praise for SXSW spontaneity. There’s more info on St. Nick’s website, and at David Lowery’s blog.

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In the interest of full disclosure: I play a very small role in the subject of today’s SXSW preview, Natural Causes. As such, I’m going to have to pass the SXSW reviewing duties along to another member of the Spout team––and in fact, as of this writing, I haven’t even seen the film, even though parts of it were made in my apartment––but we passed along our standard 4 Questions to co-directors Alex Cannon, Paul Cannon and Michael Lerman nonetheless. Check out the Emerging Visions selection’s trailer above, and answers from the boys below.

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.

25 words or less? Natural Causes is like the greatest hits of a relationship.

That said, we wrote it in 1 month and shot it in 11 days, some of them 23 hours long. This was our attempt to make an extraordinarily personal film about the nature of a young relationship. The three of us have gone through similar experiences and we know so many people who have as well. Natural Causes is our way of taking a look back at that and examining what it’s like to be with someone at this age and all the shit that goes along with it. We’re not blind to the fact that there are movies that resonate with us in an emotionally similar way, like David Gordon Green’s All the Real Girls or Atom Egoyan’s Calendar.

The best part of the whole experience might be the collaboration. Who better to make a movie with than two of your best friends? Combine that with a really great crew and you have the most fun the three of us have had, pretty much ever. Michael Tully is a jack-of-all-trades, Asif Siddiky is a genius and the whole cast is incomparable. We worked with some of the most dedicated and inexhaustible people around and the fact that nobody ended up screaming or in prison is a miracle, although we managed to get some stitches along the way. Literally.

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Today we’re taking a look at Brandon Linden’s Bootleg Wisconsin, which is screening in the Emerging Visions section at the SXSW Film Festival. It’s a drama about the summer relationship between Katherine, a married woman from Chicago who spends her summer vacation visiting outlet malls, and Billy, a younger guy who works in the Wisconsin mall that Katherine visits. There’s a trailer above, as well as tons of clips on YouTube. Brandon answers the 4 Questions We’re Askign Everybody below.

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.

Bootleg Wisconsin is the story of a young man who works at an outlet mall outside Kenosha. The store he works at is about to be closed. He starts up a relationship with a woman from Chicago who shops there and we see how it effects the two of them, and his friends and family.

My concept of it would read something like this: “If a Swedish director watched too many Naruse films drunk and then decided to do a near silent remake of Brief Encounter in a Midwest outlet mall you would have my film.”

I wanted to make the film after visiting the outlet mall with my wife, who was shopping. I got bored and started to talk to some of the kids who worked at the brand new hotel next door. They told me how the hotel was supported by people visiting the mall.

I started to think about the differences, social and economic, between the people who worked at the mall and those who visited it, and why anyone would stay overnight at a place just to shop. I wanted to make a film about this that was quiet, compassionate, and real.

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