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, starsRachael 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.
There’s a Hollywood junk vs. Egyptian trash joke buried somewhere in here: Mai Iskander once worked assistant camera on films like Deep Impact and The Bone Collector. Now, her feature directing debut, Garbage Dreams, is premiering in the Documentary Competition at SXSW. It follows three teenage Egyptian boys for four years, as they go to work in “the world’s largest garbage village.” The film’s trailer is after the jump, where director also answers The 5 Questions We Ask Everyone.
Rivkah Beth Medow and Greg O’Toole’s Sons of a Gun follows three non-related schizophrenic adults who live as a family (in a single motel room) under the care of Larry, a drunk with a background in hostage negotiation who took the men in when they had nowhere else to go. After a few work-in-progress screenings last year at True/False, the doc will have its official World Premiere in competition at SXSW. Watch the trailer and read Rivkah and Greg’s answers to The 5 Questions We Ask Everyone after the jump.
Screening in Narrative Competition at SXSW, Paul Cotter’s Bomber is a family roadtrip comedy about a “lovelorn and useless” adult son who agrees to drive his father to the village in Germany that he accidentally bombed during World War II. Below the jump, Cotter answers The 5 Questions We Ask Everyone, with thoughts on Kurosawa and Kieslowski, working with actors and non-actors, and the politics of festivals. The trailer’s down there, too. …Read more
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.
Judi Krant’s Made in China, premiering in Narrative Competition at SXSW, follows “a self-styled novelty inventor from a small town in East Texas” (Jackson Kuehn) who travels to Shanghai to make it big with his latest bright idea. In her answers to The 5 Questions We Ask Everyone, below the jump, Krant talks about paying the bills with vegetable oil, breaking out of jail with art cinema, and counteracting the SXSW conspiracy theory.
Zift is one of five films to screen at SXSW this year which is being promoted as a simultaneous premiere at the festival and on Video on Demand via IFC (like all of its fellows in the series except for Joe Swanberg’s Alexander the Last, it comes to Austin and your living room after an extensive festival run; two of the films in the series, Paper Covers Rock and Medicine for Melancholy, screened at SXSW last year). We talked to Zift director Javor Gardev talked about meeting Americans in Argentina, offered the only fast and loose plot synopsis I’ve ever seen to invoke both Casablanca and Georges Bataille, and declared himself “the king of the blurb.” We can’t argue there. The Zift trailer, and his further answers to The 5 Questions We Ask Everyone, after the jump.
Daryl Wein’s Breaking Upwards is one of my most personally anticipated films of SXSW 2009. Wein’s follow-up to last year’s SXSW doc premiere Sex Positive, Breaking is a narrative feature starring Wein and his real-life girlfriend Zoe Lister-Jones as themselves alongside a slightly-starrier supporting cast including Olivia Thirlby. Answering The 5 Questions We Ask Everyone, Wein talks about his film and stuff, but more importantly, he makes our second SXSW-related blow job joke of the day.
We have so many SXSW previews to get through in the next week leading up to the fesitival that some days, you just might get two. Today we’ll first take a look at Craig Johnson’s Narrative Competition entry True Adolescents, which is notable on paper for two reasons: it co-stars recently Oscar-nominated Melissa Leo, and it’s the film on which Mark Duplass and Lynn Shelton first discussed working on the film that would become Humpday. Answering The 5 Questions We Ask Everyone, Johnson marvels at comparisons to Kelly Reichardt, makes a blow job joke about Joe Swanberg, and names the two films that make him want to die.
Zachary Levy’s Strongman, comes to SXSW after recently having won the Grand Jury Award at the Slamdance Film Festival, but an earlier project, through which Levy partially funded the film got a bit more press. In between shooting and editing his documentary, which he calls “a real-life version of La Strada,” Levy and some friends invented Bush Cards, decks of novelty playing cards, each emblazoned with an image of a different member of the George W. Bush administration and a memorable quote and/or factoid. Donald Rumsfeld’s ace of hearts passes along a typical slice of wisdom — “I don’t know what I said but I know what I think, and well, I assume it is what I said” — without comment. The cards got tons of press and sold like hot (yellow) cakes at indie bookstores and Urban Outfitters alike.
Answering The 5 Questions We Ask Everyone, Levy both proposed restructuring film festival submissions to resemble architecture competitions (without, like, actual architecture), and gave big ups to Uncle Buck. That, and the Strongman trailer, after the jump.
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.
Our latest installment: Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, a documentary by entomologist Jessica Oreck (and shot by Sean Williams, the cinematographer of Frownland) about the affinity for insects in Japanese culture. You can watch the visually stunning trailer for the film on its website; Oreck answers The 5 Questions We Ask Everyone Below.
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 Jocelyn Cammack’s Emerging Visions documentary The Time of Their Lives. Previously screened at Sheffield Doc/Fest, the film follows three female activists –– ages 88 to 102 –– living together in a home for active elderly adults. Watch the trailer above, and read Jocelyn’s answers to The 5 Questions We Ask Everyone below.
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.
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.
A Documentary Competition world premiere, Aron Gaudet’s The Way We Get By follows a trio of senior citizens who, for the past six years, have shown up at the airport in Bangor, Maine to greet each departing and arriving plane full of U.S. troops embarking to or returning home from battle zones. Gaudet answers The 5 Questions We Ask Everyone after the jump; the film’s trailer is embedded above.
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.
Eileen Yaghoobian’s Died Young, Stayed Pretty delves deep into the subculture of indie rock poster artists. According to the film’s synopsis, its stars have “created their own visual language for describing the spotty underbelly of western civilization and they’re not shy about throwing it in the face of polite society. Along the way, they manage to create posters that are strikingly obscene, unflinchingly blasphemous and often quite beautiful.” Answering The 5 Questions We Ask Everyone, Yaghoobian talks about BBQ, Badlands, and whittling down 200 hours of footage about posters.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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There’s a Hollywood junk vs. Egyptian trash joke buried somewhere in here: Mai Iskander once worked assistant camera on films like Deep Impact and The Bone Collector. Now, her feature directing debut, Garbage Dreams, is premiering in the Documentary Competition at SXSW. It follows three teenage Egyptian boys for four years, as they go to work in “the world’s largest garbage village.” The film’s trailer is after the jump, where director also answers The 5 Questions We Ask Everyone.
Rivkah Beth Medow and Greg O’Toole’s 
Screening in Narrative Competition at SXSW, Paul Cotter’s 
Judi Krant’s 
