Texas

For many, what makes SXSW unique is the way the festival is a collision of technology, music, and film. For nine days, the sometimes disparate worlds of techies, filmmakers, and musicians warily rub elbows and in some cases combine into a potent stew of innovation and creativity.

In the next few days, the eyes of much of the film world will be on Austin, Texas. Specifically, filmmakers, fans, producers, first-time directors, distributors, actors, industry insiders and film fest newbies will be focusing their attention on the more than 250 films screening at this year’s SXSW Film Festival.

In the 25 years since the Dallas VideoFest began, annual film festivals have become an accepted occurrence in most cities.

Late last year, Drew Barrymore’s Whip It was released in theaters, giving the mainstream a fictional take on the world of modern roller derby. The story, adapted from the novel Derby Girl by Shauna Cross, focuses on an outcast teen who finds confidence and her inner power by joining the banked track league of Austin, Texas.

The fact that Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker made its US premiere one year ago at SXSW upped the intrigue this year, prompting me to wonder if one of 2010's 134 features or 126 shorts would achieve that rarefied status.

“Making a movie is like moving a mountain,” says Toddy Burton, the Austin-based filmmaker behind The Aviatrix, a film about a girl struggling with cancer who finds an escape from her troubles by becoming The Aviatrix, a superhero who rockets through outerspace.

I’m the director of the low-budget psychological thriller Room (2005), which premiered at Sundance and had its international debut in the Directors Fortnight at Cannes in May. Room was produced by The 7th Floor along with Jim McKay and Michael Stipe’s C-Hundred Film Corp.

Long gone are the days when Austin, Texas was merely a breeding-ground for progressive types, presidential hopefuls, and music junkies. As home to the South-by-Southwest Film Festival (SXSW), Austin has become the independent filmmaker’s Eden. As first time filmmaker Allison Berg explains it, "I thought [SXSW] was one of the best festivals for my film to get into . . .

The so-called “Film Brat” generation of the middle to late 1970s has been blamed for, or credited with, many things regarding independent filmmaking—from sparking off a studio-sanctioned Golden Age (Scorsese, Coppola) to ushering in a studio-sanctioned Dark Age (Lucas, Spielberg).

While the Lumiere brothers originally screened their films in a Paris café, the term microcinema was not coined until 1991 with the naming of Rebecca Barten and David Sherman’s Total Mobile Home Microcinema.