The Films You Need To Know About From This Year’s SXSW

All of our SXSW wraps were created with and are proudly presented by the Microsoft Surface Pro 2 — the one device for everything in your life.

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South By Southwest is big. Really big. In mid-March every year, approximately 50,000 people descend upon Austin, Texas for 10 days of film screenings, gigs, and the latest in innovative technology. You’re always going to run into something outside those boxes as well, like mostly naked musicians playing in the middle of 6th Street or skateboarders jumping over tables at the MS Studio.

The film program is especially epic. This year, despite crazy shifts in weather, a screening schedule that was almost impossible to keep up with, and the lack of a great breakout film, SXSW didn’t disappoint us… entirely. Here are the key takeouts from SXSW Film 2014…

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Bad Words: Kathryn Hahn thinks about sex with Jason Bateman

Besides getting a faint whiff of weed as Jason Bateman and his publicist entered the press room (I’m sure it was his publicist), Hahn — known for her stints on Parks And Recreation and Girls — jokingly told us to, “Please avoid eye contact” during her interview, in reference to the very raw and very funny sex scenes in Bateman’s feature directorial debut, Bad Words.

When a reporter asked “Were you trying different ways of doing that while you were shooting?”, Hahn answered “We shot in an actual janitor’s closet at the lovely Sportsman’s Lodge in Studio City, and in that tiny room there was about six of us, so not a lot of room for trying different positions.”

“I meant more in the delivery of your performance…”, the reporter clarified.

“Oh,” deadpanned Hahn. “My mind was in a different place.”

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Harmontown: It will make you cry and laugh and laugh and cry

Dan Harmon is not a hero. In this documentary about a 20-city tour of his live podcast Harmontown, the Community creator makes sure the audience leaves knowing and believing that Spencer, the podcast’s Dungeons & Dragons Master, is the actual hero.

A “Harmenian” is a nerd full of love, and Harmon shows us how a 30-something D&D geek living in his mother’s house can inspire hundreds of other Harmenians to come out of their shells, share their fears and doubts, and maybe even laugh a little. Okay, a lot: there’s heaps to laugh about in Harmontown, since Harmon is invariably a totally uncensored, somewhat alcoholic, emotionally abusive, self-deprecating comedian. What other kinda comedians are there?

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The Infinite Man: Infinitely amused (and infinitely confused)

We’ve all been in the kinda relationship where we’d do anything at all to keep our significant other happy, right? Even if it meant changing the things we do, or our hairstyle, or the clothes we wear. But would you ever go back in time to keep a relationship intact?

The feature film debut of Australian writer/director Hugh Sullivan is a witty time-travel comedy-romance about Dean (John McConville), a very smart and very unorthodox young scientist, who does just that in order to change the outcome of one would-be romantic weekend with his lovely girlfriend, Lana (Hannah Marshall). Unfortunately, his attempts backfire when he traps his lover in an infinite loop and the two are forever destined to… Well, we’re not quite sure, since it’s an infinite loop.

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Silicon Valley: It’s the place to be (a smartarse)

Mike Judge — creator and director of hit TV shows Beavis And Butt-Head and King Of The Hill, and cult film Office Space — has gone back to television with a new gang of hunks/nerds. The characters in his new hour-long HBO series Silicon Valley make billions of dollars, yet still don’t know how to act around girls.

“What they do is inherently un-filmable,” said Judge, after the first two episodes premiered at SXSW. “Watching people type is not fascinating.”

What was fascinating (and hysterically funny) were the cast on-stage during the post-screening Q&A. They took jabs at audience members, sometimes laughing with them and sometimes at them. When the moderator posed a question about improvisation with the script, it quickly divulged into an analogy of pasta as scripted comedy and fruit as improv comedy: “Most of the show is pasta,” clarified T.J. Miller, who plays Erlich.

Judge just sat there mostly shaking his head the whole time.

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The Fray: Or, what I did after getting shut out of The Grand Budapest Hotel

As I’ve mentioned, SXSW is overwhelming: in scope, in size, in content, in numbers. With something that big, your schedule is sure to be screwed up any number of ways. Hopefully, though, when you get tossed a wrench (like the line for Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel reaching capacity three hours before the screening), something else is waiting around the corner. Despite surely never forgiving myself for missing the film’s premiere and, more importantly, the following Q (provided by Richard Linklater ) & A (provided by Anderson himself), getting the opportunity to hear The Fray wail at Emo’s was a distant second but better than nothing.

According to someone who made it, Anderson was joined by longtime music supervisor Randall Poster and Jason Schwartzman. For the most part, Anderson and Schwartzman talked about how much they love each other, before ratting out Bill Murray for growing “a more extreme moustache, that had to be reduced on location.”

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Fort Tilden: It won SXSW, but robbed me of two hours

The film that took home the big enchilada of prizes (the Grand Jury Prize) is unabashedly about Millennials, but I’m not sure that Millennials will see the irony or understand the thin veil of self-awareness imposed on them via flighty 25-year-olds Harper (Bridey Elliot) and Allie (Clare McNulty). At worst, I think they may actually take offense with it, and at best, be, like, totally super-annoyed by the way Allie and Harper’s small worldview and selfish stupidity can so totally ruin a day at the beach. Like, seriously.

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SXSW is not just about observing — you can create stuff, too

Down at the MS Studio, there were endless bowls full of candy, a Questlove concert, and a filmmaking workshop where anyone who signed up got to shoot footage of skateboarders in 6K with an RED Epic Dragon camera. Sign me up! Using my Surface Pro 2 tablet to edit and manipulate the footage, I learnt how to pull stills from the footage and play with them in Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop and Premiere. Finally, I learnt how to colour-correct and grade the footage using Assimilate’s ‘SCRATCH Play’, one of the newer and less costly finishing programs on the market for indie filmmakers.

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Hellion: 17-year-old newcomer Josh Wiggins tears shit up

Originally premiering at Sundance but playing to hometown audiences in Texas during SXSW, Hellion is a heavy metal, heavy emotion dramatic look at the destruction a dead parent can cause in the life of a teenager. This exclusive clip from the opening sequence of the film gives you a taste of what Jacob (Wiggins) is going through, but you’ll have to watch the whole film to see the devastating performance by his father, played by Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul.

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Space Station 76: Director Jack Plotnick would be great company in a major catastrophe

I know directors, and I know that they are not the type to take a technical glitch at their premiere screening lightly. That’s why Jack Plotnick should be voted ‘Most Down-To-Earth’ director, not only for his ’70s-futuristic-suburban-spaceship-mashup Space Station 76, but for the way he handled the snafu at the ZACH Topfer Theater when the projector broke down four minutes into the film.

When the screen went black and auditorium lights went up, an audible groan swept the audience. But Plotnick jumped up from his seat near stars Patrick Wilson and Matt Bomer and gleefully bantered, “Wonderful! I already have so many questions!” The mood turned from pissed to playful in a matter of seconds while Plotnick joked about a sequel, took questions from audience members like “Is Patrick Wilson single?” (he held up his adorned ring finger for all to see), and generally kept the pace light while the system rebooted.

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Veronica Mars: Kristin Bell brought her baby to SXSW, but not to the premiere

Although her publicist would have most definitely smacked me with her purse had I snuck a picture, I slyly watched a mummy-mode Kristen Bell touting Baby Bell around the Four Seasons lobby on the morning of the premiere for Veronica Mars.

Later that evening, squeals of delight came from thousands of diehard Veronica Mars fans as the lights dimmed for the worldwide premiere of the film that broke Kickstarter records with its $5.7 million raised from 92,000 backers. After the screening, cast members Enrico Colantoni, Jason Dohring, Chris Lowell, Percy Daggs III and Francis Capra joined creator/director Rob Thomas and Bell on stage for a Q&A.

“This is such an extra special experience,” said Bell. “It’s so humbling to know that the reason we’re here is because of our Kickstarter friends. We don’t take that lightly, that you guys are the reason this movie got made.”

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The Mend: The best line of the fest

Even if an indie film festival doesn’t give us the next Like Crazy (2011) or Beasts Of The Southern Wild (2012) or Short Term 12 (2013), you can still walk away with a line that catches you off-guard and makes you wish you knew what was going through the writer’s mind as they wrote it.

This year, it came from writer/director John Magary during his sometimes-comedic and completely unorthodox family drama, The Mend. I’m just waiting for the right moment in my life to use it. It could be 30 years from now, but this one will stick:

“Your voice should be bottled up and thrown at terrorists.”

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Chef: 10-year-old takes the cake

It’s a movie about very current trends — food porn, food trucks, foodies, and social media — but at its corny little centre, there’s a relationship between a father and a son that choked me up more than once. Jon Favreau wrote, directed and stars in Chef, but little-known 10-year-old Emjay Anthony steals the food show.

So glad I had my Surface Pro 2 to capture Anthony adorably admitting how nervous he is on stage and answering audience member’s questions at the Q&A.

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Cesar Chavez: Actors do as Cesar Chavez did

Quite often, we don’t know actors outside of the movies we see them in. When it comes to philanthropy or activism, there are the standard big names we see in the news — George Clooney, Angelina Jolie, Sean Penn, Natalie Portman — but that’s about it when it comes to getting information about stars outside of what they’re wearing or who they’re dating.

During my interview with Cesar Chavez director Diego Luna and co-star Rosario Dawson, it became clear that just because it’s not splashed on Page Six, it doesn’t mean that other actors aren’t giving back as well. Dawson is co-founder of Voto Latino, which helps Latinos get out to vote, and an avid supporter and member of V-Day, a global organisation aimed at ending violence against women and girls, and the Lower East Side Girls Club.

“While we were filming,” she told me, “Dolores [Huerta, Chavez’s right-hand woman and the role Dawson portrays in the film] got The Presidential Medal of Freedom. And America [Ferrera, who plays Helen Chavez] started the ‘America4America’ campaign. It was so interesting to be pretending to do this kind of activism in a film and in these characters’ clothing, and then in our own lives we were doing it as well. It just felt so cool. I think it was probably nice for Helen and Dolores to not just be portrayed by some actors who didn’t want to [connect with them].”

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Valentina Valentini is a freelance journalist based in Los Angeles, who specialises in writing about cinematographers, independent filmmaking, and motion picture industry trends. Her work has been featured in Variety, IndieWire, MovieMaker Magazine, Vulture, and more. Find her on Twitter at @tiniv.