Interview:
Janet Pierson,
SXSW Film Festival
Director of Film
The SXSW Film Festival opens March 9 with the John Krasinski-directed chiller A Quiet Place, in which he stars with his wife Emily Blunt, and closes March 17 with Isle of Dogs, the latest stop-motion animated adventure by The Grand Budapest Hotel director and University of Texas grad Wes Anderson. The remaining headliners are Kay Cannon’s comedy Blockers, Shana Feste’s Boundaries, Daryl Hannah’s directorial debut PARADOX, Stanley Tucci’s dramedy Final Portrait. Other narrative films screening during SXSW include Sebastian Gutierrez’s Elizabeth Harvest, Augustine Frizzell’s Never Goin’ Back, Julia Hart’s Fast Color, Jody Hill’s The Legacy of a Whitetail Deer Hunter, Melanie Laurent’s Galveston, Ari Aster's Hereditary, Spike Lee’s Pass Over, Paul Schrader’s First Reformed, and Lynn Shelton’s Outside In. Austin is represented by a mixture of narrative and documentary features and shorts, including Yen Tan’s 1985, Ethan Hawke’s Blaze, Owen Egerton’s Blood Fest, Andrew Bujalski’s Support the Girls, and the Zellner brothers’ Damsel. In addition, there are the programs devoted to Texas Shorts and Texas High School Shorts. There also will be documentary competition and non-competition programs, music videos, foreign-language films from France to Lebannon to Nepal, Midnighters, and screenings of such new TV shows as Barry, Condor, Krypton, The Last O.G., Vida, and the Warriors of Liberty City. This year’s SXSW also sees the return of the film festival’s Virtual Cinema, featuring 25 projects that tell stories through virtual reality. Plus there will be a retrospective screening of The Atomic Café and the annual Doug Benson/ Master Pancake St. Patrick’s Day roasting of a Leprechaun sequel, this time Leprechaun In the Hood. The SXSW Film Conference will include keynotes speakers with Darren Aronofsky and Barry Jenkins as well as Olivier Assayas and Richard Linklater in conversation and featured speakers Joe Berlinger, Jason Blum, Lena Dunham, Ethan Hawke, Rian Johnson, Spike Lee, Westworld showrunners and creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, and the cast and crew of NBC’s This Is Us. Aired: Feb. 22, 2018 Web site: https://www.sxsw.com/festivals/film/ |
|