Visually more sophisticated than the bulk of features to yet come out of the new wave of DIY independent American cinema, narratively smoother and yet still boundless in mold-breaking ambition, Medicine for Melancholy offers a self-contained rebuttal to claims that precious, naturalistic dramas about the existential dilemmas of hipster singles are exclusively a white man’s game. But the most exciting thing about the film is that director Barry Jenkins doesn’t seem interested in rebutting anything, or in playing any sort of game but his own. His mission: to talk about what it feels like to be young, black and artsy in a city in which people who fit that description make up a minuscule fraction of the population.
Formally and thematically, Melancholy is, in fact, driven by fractions. African-Americans currently make up less than 7 percent of the city of San Francisco. Several decades of gentrification have all but whitewashed the city’s historically non-white communities south of Market Street; the few non-gentrified pockets still standing are under constant threat of being steamrolled by the luxury housing boom. To make that point visually, Jenkins and cinematographer James Laxton literally drain the color almost completely from their digital video image (on first viewing, I guessed that the entirety of the film had been desaturated 93 percent to match the racial breakdown, but in a recent interview, Jenkins said the level of desaturation actually fluctuates). The resulting image is soft and smoggy, mostly gray with pastel hints. Melancholy may be more committed to certain of the city’s un-pretty social truths than any other recent fiction film set in San Francisco, but ironically, as a sheer portrait of the city, it’s also maybe the most beautiful.
We’ve spent the past three weeks previewing films that are going to be premiering at SXSW, but the festival also has a conference component, with four days packed full of panels. Karina (that’s me) will be speaking on the Blogs, Buzz and Buddy lists panel on Sunday at 3:30. I’ll also be moderating a panel at 1pm on Monday called Deal or No Deal: The Road to Self-Distribution.
As far as panels that don’t actually require me to operate a microphone are concerned, I’m really excited about the Jeffrey Tambor Acting Workshop. Yes, George (and Oscar) Bluth himself is going to let us in on his “process.” Even cooler, he’s gonna do it by coaching Hannah Takes the Stairs stars Greta Gerwig and Kent Osbourne through a reading of an excerpt of John Patrick Shanley’s The Dreamer Examines His Pillow. Yes, seriously. The magic happens at 1pm on Sunday.
There are tons of other great events going on and no one can attend them all, but after the jump you’ll find a list of a few I have my eye on. If you’re on a panel or have panels you’re particularly excited about, let us know in the comments.
Second Skin, a documentary to be featured later this week in the Spotlight Premieres section at SXSW, follows a handful of gamers who are deeply devoted to Massively Multiplayer Online games such as Second Life and World of Warcraft. The film premieres on Friday at 9pm at the Austin Convention Center. Check out the trailer above, and answers to the 4 Questions We’re Asking Everybody, from director Juan Carlos Pineiro Escoriaza, and producers Victor Pineiro and Peter Schieffelin Brauer below. Victor Piniero and I are also speaking on the same SXSW panel, Blogs, Buzz and Buddy Lists, which goes down on Sunday, March 9.
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.
Juan Carlos: This flick is like An Inconvenient Truth meets Errol Morris. Except that the movie we’ve been making for two years doesn’t involve an environmental crisis. I kept on coming back to An Inconvenient Truth, because online games (MMO’s) have the power to change the landscape of our society. Games like World of Warcraft, Everquest 2, and Second Life have and will continue to make our global community closer in ways that I think are just becoming clear now. I’m not trying to imply that it is going to cause problems on the scale of global flooding, but I think it is a societal evolution that we are running to catch up with. Errol Morris’ Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control on the other hand takes a really intimate look into people’s obsessions. Which is to say that our movie is about people who tend to play a lot of MMO’s. In our film I try to balance between that gigantic cultural phenomenon, and the personal lives of people who are ‘just gamers’. Finding a way to say this movie is about a burgeoning sub-culture AND seven people - is a delicate balance. Suffice to say I think you’ll be pretty surprised where everything ends up.
Butterknife creator Joe Swanberg returns to SXSW with his fourth feature in as many years, Nights and Weekends. This one is co-written, co-directed and co-stars Greta Gerwig, of Hannah Takes the Stairs and Baghead fame, and it was shot by Matthias Grunsky, the man behind the camera on both of Andrew Bujalski’s features. Check out the trailer above, and Greta’s answers to the 4 Questions We’re Asking 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.
Nights and Weekends is When Harry Meets Sally meets DIE HARD without the cuteness or the explosions. It is a collaboration between Joe Swanberg and myself, with Kent Osborne, Lynn Shelton, Jay Duplass, and Elizabeth Donius in the mix. That synopsis leaves out just about everything.
Do you have a day job/a non-filmmaking occupation that raises money for your filmmaking efforts? Tell us about it.
My non-filmmaking jobs have been tutoring kids for the SATs, being a club kid, catering, babysitting, and looking for change under my couch.
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 Girlsor 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.
Judging by its trailer alone,Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie seems to approach its mythic subject from an angle that sounds, well, atypical. A documentary portrait of Bigfoot hunters in Applachian Ohio, the doc ties the pursuit of these probably fictional creatures to the area’s decaying economy and a shared desire to transcend the everyday. You can watch that trailer above; director Jay Delaney answers the 4 Questions We’re Asking 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.
It’s like American Movie meets Grizzly Man! As the title hints, it’s about more than just Bigfoot. Through the experiences of two amateur Bigfoot researchers in southern Ohio, Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie provides a look at how the power of a dream can bring two men together and provide a source of hope and meaning that transcend the harsh realities of life. The feature doc grew out of a short doc I made back in 2001 – American Dream – about these two local Bigfoot researchers in my hometown. The short haunted me for years thereafter, and I always wanted to revisit the project in greater depth.
I see a tremendous amount of honesty in Dallas and Wayne’s story, and it raises so many questions in my mind. My connection to the story stems largely from its ability to capture the contemporary state of the American Dream in old Appalachian steel towns like Portsmouth, Ohio. Although the economies there face some real challenges, people like Dallas and Wayne find a way to hold onto their dreams and keep hope and faith alive.
Daniel Stamm’s Emerging Visions entry A Necessary Death looks like it has the potential to be one of the more controversial titles on this year’s SXSW Film Festival slate. The documentary-style feature tracks a film student who places an ad on Craig’s List in order to find a determinedly suicidal individual to film in the days leading up to the fatal act. Judging by the trailer (embedded above) and the film’s brief, enigmatic SXSW synopsis, it seems as though Death could be reasonably situated within a trend that Eric Kohn cited last month at Slamdance, of “YouTube generation filmmakers” seeking “to tell fictional stories within a documentary framework.” We shall see when the film premieres in Austin on March 8. In the meantime, watch the trailer above, and see Stamm’s answers to the 4 Questions We’re Asking 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.
The quick and dirty sell is:
“Documentary Filmmaker looking for suicidal individual to follow from first preparation to final act.” Cut from 142 video tapes, this film sheds light on the tragedy following the infamous internet ad.
That may be 31 words but at least they don’t leave anything out, so I am saving words overall. I am also saving words where why I made the movie is concerned. I was fascinated by the story and I saw that others were just as stunned by it. That’s really it.
I worked with an incredible cinematographer, Zoltan Honti, whom we had to wait for every now and then because he was working with Vilmos Zsigmond on Brian dePalma’s or Woody Allen’s sets. Switching back and forth between the glossy look of Black Dahlia and the grittiness of A Necessary Death can’t have been easy. But that is how good he is. Well worth waiting for.
I was lucky enough to get to work with award-winning editor Shilpa K. Sahi and casting director Mali Finn. Mali cast films like Titanic, Matrix, and L.A. Confidential. She was a wonderful woman who sadly passed away last year.
The score was written by Morgan Kibby of the Romanovs and Jonathan Leahy of the Broken Remotes - both of which I couldn’t be a bigger fan of. Leonard Cohen wanted Morgan for his world tour. She said no and set out on her own tour with M83. Kids these days. No respect. …Read more
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.
Above, you’ll find the trailer for Intimidad, David Redmon and Ashley Sabin’s second SXSW premiere in two years, after 2007’s devastating Kamp Katrina. Shot on both film and video over the course of four years, Intimidad documents a young couple’s life on the Mexico/Texas border. Screening as part of SXSW’s Lone Star States program, the film premieres at the Alamo South Lamar on Friday, March 7, at 10pm. Below, Ashley and David answer the 4 Questions We’re Asking Everybody.
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.
Ashley Sabin: David Redmon and I have been working on this film for about 4 and a half years. We started making the film as a Victoria Secret factory film. It’s through the organic process of watching the footage and finding the story that we realized the film was not about the factory and more about everyday intimacy told by the main characters, Cecy and Camilo. It’s also the first film I ever shot so it’s interesting/nerve wrecking to see the growth in my own filmmaking development. We left cameras with Cecy and Camilo and they essentially became part of the crew. We started filming their daughter - Loida - when she was 2 years old up until now (she’s six years old). Watching her grow is one of my favorite parts of the movie. We might something similar to 7up where we film her for the next 10, 15, or 20 years and see where she ends up (but it depends on her and her parent’s decision). She is an amazingly charismatic little girl!
David Redmon: Ashley and I worked together, but the family in the film also worked on it. It’s about a family trying to stay together to accomplish their dream of buying land and building a house in Reynosa, Mexico.
Do you have a day job/a non-filmmaking occupation that raises money for your filmmaking efforts? Tell us about it.
AS: David and I are lucky enough to not have to get a second job this month. However, I would consider our second job distribution. We have put out our first two films, Mardi Gras: Made in China and Kamp Katrina. It’s a lot of work and adds a whole other layer to our relationship with our films but I find it very rewarding.
DR: Yes, we travel to colleges, show our films, and discuss them with students and teachers. I’d like to finish the book I started a few years ago.
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?
AS: We were at SXSW last year with our feature documentary, Kamp Katrina. Everything about the festival was amazing and great. We met some remarkable people who we still stay in touch with and saw some great risk taking films. I guess the only speed bump was when I got the nerve to walk up to an unnamed film distribution guy and give him the “pitch” of our film and my card and he looked at it and passed it off to the woman next to him. What a sly guy! Both shocked and mortified I walked away. This event reaffirmed why I do self distribution and love it!
DR: Yes, we ran into a crazy man who spontaneously took us to four different all night parties in the pouring Texas thunderstorm rain, until we ended up at a diner at 5am and finally found out his name: Michael Lerman [co-director of SXSW 2008 feature Natural Causes].
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?
AS: I always get hung up on these questions because days later I always want to add on more but I think that if my life were to end I would need something comforting so I would resort to childhood favorites, Labyrinth and Princess Bride, or and maybe if I got a third Harry and the Hendersons. These three films my younger brother and sister and I would watch over and over again. It’s partially why I have a serious but rather silly phobia of Bigfoots. I guess to confront that phobia I should go see the doc on Bigfoots but I would need to do with David by my side.
We’ve spent the past three weeks previewing films that are going to be premiering at SXSW, but the festival also has a conference component, with four days packed full of panels. Karina (that’s me) will be speaking on the Blogs, Buzz and Buddy lists panel on Sunday at 3:30. I’ll also be moderating a panel at 1pm on Monday called Deal or No Deal: The Road to Self-Distribution.
