SXSW Sum Up Day 5 & 6 - Hailing Hannah...

Stairs-way to Heaven and SXSW Award Winners

My parents have told me that I first fell in love with film during a 1980s rerelease of Fantasia that unfortunately can’t remember now. However, I will remember that I fell in love with film again, or at least the concept of film despite it being shot in digital video, at SXSW 2007. And it’s all thanks to Joe Swanberg, Andrew Bujalski, Greta Gerwig, Mark Duplass, Todd Rohal, Kent Osbourne and Ry Russo Young, the group of ultra indie filmmakers who came together to make the wonderfully idosyncratic romantic comedy Hannah Takes the Stairs as well as the highly amusing SXSW shorts that have played in front of every festival movie.

You see, every year, SXSW commissions a filmmaker to make a couple of short films to accompany the festival films – typically cutesy and at times abstract vignettes about making movies that usually become tiresome after you’ve seen more than three movies at the festival. (After 15 movies, you downright want to strangle the projectionist for still playing them.) But even though I’m not laughing as hard now as when I first saw the minute long creations that were put together by Swanberg and crew while they were shooting his festival film Hannah, every time I watch a particularly handsy sound technician (Kevin Bewersdorf) trying to put a small microphone on Gerwig’s tank top (and the actress is obviously not wearing a bra), there’s something fresh about the scene – and I’ve seen that one four times already.

Other shorts include The Puffy Chair writer Duplass having his cell phone go off during a climactic fight scene with Bujalski and Osbourne, who may be best known for co-writing The Spongebob Squarepants Movie, trying to fight off…well, let’s just say it’s not a gun in his pocket and he needs to film an emotional scene. Of course, these shorts are particularly fitting to this year’s festival since Hannah made its world premiere at the festival (Premiere.com will have a story later on this week on the film). But SXSW has found part of their identity in embracing this group of filmmakers that feel like they’re staging something of a revolution with their intimate, often uncomfortable comedies and dramas that boast no stars and sometimes even no scripts, but share an amazing feeling of authenticity. In fact, when a character disrobes in Russo-Young’s searing sibling story Orphans, your first instinct is to look away out of politeness.

I should mention, and I realize this is burying the lead, that Orphans won a special jury prize last night in the narrative category at last night’s awards, which are treated in the same way as most everything else in the laid-back city of Austin. Jamie Babbitt’s feminist punk comedy Itty Bitty Titty Committee won best narrative film, although it had already been recognized informally as having the best title of any film at the festival. Billy the Kid, Jennifer Venditti’s documentary about the life of a teenager as he grows up, won the best documentary prize while the Monty Miranda directed comedy Skills Like This and the political themed doc Run Granny Run won the audience awards. Anyway, tonight will be a more glitzy evening, as I will be off to see the regional premiere of Reign Over Me, which will have stars Adam Sandler and Don Cheadle in attendance. More on that later.

-Stephen Saito

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