Everyone has their own personal moment when the reality of the COVID-19 pandemic finally hit home. Maybe it was the halt to the NBA season. Or a personal encounter with sickness. For the entertainment business, nothing brought the gravity of the situation into such stark relief as seeing the city of Austin cancel the 2020 SXSW festival less than a week before it was scheduled to kick off.
For years, as the festival grew from a cool place to see up-and-coming bands into a multinational, multidisciplinary megalodon, it seemed like an unstoppable force. A source of both pride and annoyance for Austinites, it was also a major driver of the local economy, and its once fledgling film festival had turned into a major launching pad for everything from the most avant-garde of American indies to blockbuster studio comedies. The idea of it ceasing to exist went from unimaginable to all too real within a matter of days.
Perhaps that’s why, two years later, SXSW’s return to an in-person event this week feels particularly special. (Variety’s parent company, Penske Media, is a shareholder of SXSW.)
“The pandemic began with the canceling of SXSW,” says Austin mayor Steve Adler, “so it’s only fitting that the reopening of this event is what celebrates the return of a now pandemic-informed, even more special and just city.”
As longtime SXSW director of film Janet Pierson notes, “There are lots of other film festivals and other conferences and other trade shows, but you don’t have this particular combination of all these professionals in these different fields mixing it up together in a city like this. There’s an alchemic spirit that you can’t duplicate.”
The festival’s film program began to stand on its own thanks to a number of big breakouts — “Short Term 12,” “Bridesmaids” and “A Quiet Place” chief among them — but the importance of SXSW Film goes far beyond its usefulness as a marketing vehicle. If you’ve ever ventured beyond the celeb-driven headliners into the margins of SXSW’s program, you’ll know there’s an ineluctable character to the films programmed here: a showcase for inventive, off-kilter, often genuinely weird emerging voices that couldn’t be found anywhere else.
This year, for example, 40 of the fest’s 100 or so movies are from first-time feature filmmakers, and “for some of them, maybe that’s the only film they’ll ever make,” says Claudette Godfrey, SXSW’s director of film festival programming. “And then some of them, like [directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert], we premiered a music video they won an award for in 2012, and now 10 years later we’re going to have a new feature that they made on opening night [‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’]. SXSW can be a really beautiful experience for filmmakers, whether they go on and keep making art or take a different route.”
Of course, this year’s fest will also boast plenty of bigger names, with new films from Austin royalty Richard Linklater and Ethan Hawke; star vehicles for Nicolas Cage, Sandra Bullock and Michelle Yeoh; and a closing-night premiere of the final season of FX’s “Atlanta.” But plenty of the program dwells in SXSW’s categorically uncategorizable sweet spot. Politics play a part as well, with films like “Mama Bears” putting a spotlight on LGBTQ rights within the evangelical community — a topic that has gained renewed relevance in light of Texas’ extreme new anti-transgender legislation. (Indeed, as often as Austin seems to exist in an entirely different world from the rest of the state, much of SXSW takes place within sight of the Statehouse, and the festival has always made space for powerful voices of dissent.)
So as much as locals might still complain about the traffic and the flood of out-of-towners, Godfrey speaks for many when she stresses the importance of seeing the festival’s projectors firing up again. “I was born and raised in Austin,” she says, “and I first volunteered for the festival when I was 18. Then I interned here, then worked part time, then wiggled my way up. SXSW is my whole life.”