The South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Conference and Festival unveiled its lineup of 109 features including 69 world premieres Thursday. The festival, which overlaps with SXSW's music and interactive programs, also includes 14 North American and five U.S. premieres. SXSW will screen eight films each in its Narrative Feature and Documentary Competitions.
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Indie auteur Joe Swanberg has established himself as the reigning poster child of mumblecore, for better or worse, but as the most surprising filmmaker contributing to the Sundance hit horror anthology V/H/S (in theaters Friday) he begins branching out of his comfort zone with a newfound energy; his entry, The Sick Thing That Happened To Emily When She Was Younger, was filmed using Skype — and a script! — and is also one of the more memorable and inventive shorts in the midnight crowd-pleasing omnibus.
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It's hard to say who really won, or if nobody won, or if everyone won last night when filmmaker Joe Swanberg (LOL, Hannah Takes The Stairs) and Badass Digest critic Devin Faraci took their creative differences to the boxing ring at the Fantastic Debates, an annual Fantastic Fest highlight that combines traditional debate with actual fisticuffs. Technically, their topic of debate was "Mumblecore is catshit and is giving a bad name to independent films," though given Swanberg's position as the micro-indie movement's poster child, the fight got personal as soon as it began.
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The horror anthology V/H/S was one of the freshest genre discoveries to come out of Sundance '12, and this fall it finally arrives in theaters and on VOD. Revel in the found-footage conceit — done particularly well here, spanning short segments by the likes of Adam Wingard, Ti West, Joe Swanberg, and more filmmakers to keep on your radar — with a look at the official poster, itself a clever, cryptic spin on the old hand-marked VHS tapes some folks still have lurking in dusty closets and basements.
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If you've grown tired of the gimmickry and diminishing quality of "found footage" horror, Sundance's Midnight program just delivered the cure: V/H/S, an anthology film comprised of shorts by six up-and-coming horror/indie filmmakers, each working within the parameter that their story be told via found media. The Devil Inside this ain't; V/H/S is fresh and pulse-quickening to the end, one of the best discoveries of this year's fest.
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The indie filmmaking game (as in true-blue, studio-free indie filmmaking) has gotten to a point where even Francis Ford Coppola is following Kevin Smith into the great unknown of out-of-the-box distribution experimentation, but mumblecore vet Joe Swanberg (LOL, Hannah Takes the Stairs) has partnered with independent release label Factory 25 on yet another crazy idea: Selling four-film, one-year subscriptions to his fans for $99.95 a pop, like a film version of artisanal foodstuff and wine club models.
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