The streets have grown increasingly crowded in Austin this week, as South by Southwest gradually transitions into a dense, raucous music festival. Nevertheless, the screenings continue through Saturday, and interest in them remains strong: After Tuesday's award ceremony, several of the winners benefited from the boost of attention in their final showings.
For some filmmakers, SXSW provides the rare opportunity to screen niche or esoteric movies to a receptive crowd before they are condemned to oblivion. Most of the grand jury prize winners were first-time directors, and in several cases, the productions were self-consciously humble and very clearly made on exceedingly tight budgets. But this did not limit their expressive power, as two of the festival's stand-out films demonstrate.
Wellness, the Grand Jury Award winner in the narrative feature category, follows a traveling salesman shilling for a scam as he gets turned away time and time again. Using a middle-aged, non-professional actor gives the movie an immediately sorrowful tone—we witness true sadness on the screen as the protagonist fumbles with unpracticed machinations and bemoans his aimless life. Jake Mahaffy directs the movie using incredibly cheap production values to his advantage: Not only does he shoot on low grade video, the whole movie is done on location in Pennsylvania, where the snow is thick and the world just meanders along. The sterile aesthetic reflects the salesman's dry, uunremarkable existence. And, of course, it's cheaper to shoot it that way.
The East Harlem drama Up With Me also manages to use inexpensive techniques to its advantage. Greg Takoudes made the film, which won the Special Jury Award for Best Ensemble Cast, as part of something called The Harlem Movie Project, collaborating with at-risk teens in all aspects of the production. The result is initially difficult to enjoy; the shaky-cam and improvisatory performances from young amateur actors takes somegetting used to, but Takoudes finds a way to make the video reflect these characters' day-t-day reality, and it often becomes quite beautiful.
In both cases, the cheapness of the productions works to the direct benefit of the content, and their websites bear out that approach. The general form for movie websites, discussed at SXSW earlier this week in a panel called "Pimp Your Film's Website," tends to include a homepage with a trailer, festival tags links to plot summary, cast bios and other relevant information. Wellness and Up With Me both offer all of that, and little else. Sometimes, simplicity works best. The question for both these films, though, is what comes next after the festical accolades.
—Eric Kohn
Check out yesterday's dispatch here , and come back tomorrow for the final SXSW report.