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• Clive Owen

SXSW – The awards

The film festival draws to a close, while Time Out is blown away by Austin's Alamo Drafthouse

Mar 19 2007

As this already laid-back film festival winds down, the organisers of SXSW handed out a bunch of awards in quite the most relaxed gong-giving ceremony I've ever attended. With half the winners at screenings, parties or on their way home, it was mercifully brief and extremely funny, which is all you can ask of these sorts of occasions.

'Itty Bitty Titty Committee', a lesbian love story that features a radical political group called Clits in Action, won the jury award for best narrative feature while 'Billy the Kid', a film about remarkable 15-year-old Billy Price, won the documentary feature category.

This being SXSW though, the audience also gets the chance to have its say, voting for films throughout the fest and deciding that 'Skills Like This', a comedy about a bank robbing playwright, was the best narrative feature while 'Run Granny Run', about a 94-year-old grandmother attempting to get elected to the US Senate, was the best documentary feature.

But 'South By' isn't really a festival about winners and losers, it's about the town of Austin and the people who flock here this week. An oasis of culture and cool in the midst of the Lone Star state, it's a Mecca of sorts for the creative and artistic of America, while at the same time being quite the most vibrant party town I've ever had the pleasure of visiting. Hit downtown and pretty much every building is a bar, club or live venue, while eccentrics frequent every corner, encouraging you to see their film or catch their band or simply wanting to shake your hand and have a chat. Indeed, it's hard to walk down the street without bumping into some celebrity or being accosted by a crazy, and I've already pretended to be Clive Owen for a TV advert (see pic above), while yesterday I spent more time talking to the naked cowboy than was probably necessary.

On the film front it's also absolute heaven thanks to the town's marvellous moviehouses. The Paramount Theatre is a stunning building where you could spend as much time looking at the ornate ceiling as anything that's playing on the screen (though somebody needs to turn up the temp in there!).

And you'd be hard pressed to find a cinema better that the Alamo Drafthouse anywhere in the world. Great sound, great screen, great seats, a great programme of old and new films playing pretty much 24/7, it also has a brilliant team of waiters who bring you food and drink throughout the feature. Indeed, I saw three films there earlier in the week, and managed to do breakfast, lunch and dinner (plus a couple of beers) without ever having to leave my seat. This is the way movies are meant to be watched, and with Drafthouses starting to spring up elsewhere in the state, the franchise can't hit the UK soon enough.