South by Southwest Film Festival

The famous music fest's little sibling makes some noise.

Milling around Austin, Texas, during the South by Southwest Film Festival (which ran from March 7 through 15), you were likely to hear people debating whether growth is a good thing for the fest. Begun as a supplement to the famous music fest, SXSW Film has gained a reputation for spotting good docs and showcasing some breakout narrative indies. The studios have taken notice, and it’s clear—from the number of publicists hovering like BlackBerry-equipped gnats and the screenings of Hollywood fare like 21, Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay—that the fest is being tempted to walk down the Sundance path. But, to torture a metaphor, the fest’s real center of gravity remains the outer edge of low-budget indie.

Among the narrative films, I was most impressed with Explicit Ills, a multistory drama set mostly in the poorer neighborhoods of Philadelphia. Writer/director Mark Webber avoids the usual tendency to make the stories too thematically tidy and interconnected. He also has a bold approach to scene construction; some scenes seem to fade in and out of the movie rather than beginning and ending, while other scenes feel like fully formed short films. Remember the title; you’ll want to check it out when it comes around at an as-yet-unspecified date.

At the very intimate end of the indie spectrum, Gabriel Fleming’s The Lost Coast, which has yet to gain distribution, is an elegant example of how to do a lot with a small cast (basically four characters) and a consistent tone that Fleming described in the postfilm discussion as “quiet tension.” Just so. Old high-school friends now in their twenties wander around San Francisco on Halloween, and the messy subtext of their friendship (two of the guys, one of whom now identifies as straight while the other is gay, messed around sexually in high school) comes to the surface.

Among the docs, on which the fest has made its name, I caught two standouts, and neither involved Iraq (shocking, huh?). Dreams With Sharp Teeth is a fairly conventional profile doc, but the subject makes the thing pop; writer Harlan Ellison, famous for pushing the boundaries of sci-fi, is a high-energy crank who is likely to verbally abuse the audience and then try to sell them a copy of his book. (He did exactly that in a Q&A after the film’s first screening.) No word on distribution as yet, but it’ll be a shock if this doesn’t show up somewhere, even if it’s only on cable.

But the standout stunner of my fest experience was Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father. Doc-maker Kurt Kuenne’s friend Andrew Bagby was murdered by an angry former girlfriend. When the police were closing in, she fled to Canada and fought extradition long enough to give birth to Bagby’s son. Kuenne set out to make a film for that child about the father he would never know. As anyone who’s read Dance With the Devil knows, the case changed even while Kuenne was filming, and he has made an incredible film about grief and loss. Unlike most filmmakers dealing with tragedy, Kuenne refuses to go slow and ponderous; the film often ratchets up to a frenzied pace as Bagby’s friends and family react to each new twist. The audience was audibly sobbing at the end of the screening, and you can expect the same thing if and when the film makes it to Chicago.

So far, the presence of a few big names hasn’t ruined SXSW’s more laid-back film-lover vibe. Here’s hoping it stays that way.

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