SXSW2024 – ALLIANCE OF WOMEN FILM JOURNALISTS

WE STRANGERS (SXSW2024) – Review by Valerie Kalfrin

March 25, 2024March 25, 2024 Valerie Kalfrin Anu Valia, Maria Dizzia, SXSW2024, Tina Lifford, We Strangers

A White woman peers through the windows of an elegant modern home. A Black woman opens the door. “Um, hi. I haven’t seen you here before,” the White woman says. The audacity of the implied question is one microaggression that Ray, the Black woman in this interaction, faces in We Strangers. Debuting at the 2024 SXSW Film Festival, this empathetic drama full of wry humor puts viewers in Ray’s shoes as she navigates racism and classism while trying to use things she learns to her advantage.

Festivals Interviews

Katie Mathews on ROLEPLAY (SXSW2024)

March 25, 2024March 25, 2024 Nadine Whitney documentary, Goat in the Road Productions, hookup culture, Katie Mathews, Roleplay, sexual politics on campus, SXSW2024, Tulane University

Katie Mathew: I’m certainly not an expert in the history of sexual education in America but I wonder if we haven’t ever escaped our Puritan roots in the colonization of this country. Sex is still somehow taboo. With the continuously disappearing line between State and (Conservative Christian) Church, sex for pleasure (or a non-cis-straight-white man’s right to desire and enjoy sex) is demonized. Unfortunately curiosity and hunger for knowledge doesn’t disappear when suppressed. Young people are receiving misinformation or misogynistic information about sex from the internet, peers, and certain types of porn. Awareness, dialogue, and education is KEY to healthier and safer sexual relationships.

Festivals Reviews

MAMIFERA (SXSW2024) – Review by Valerie Kalfrin

March 24, 2024March 25, 2024 Valerie Kalfrin Anna Alarcón, Enric Auquer, Liliana Torres, Mamífera, Maria Rodríguez Soto, Special Jury Award, SXSW2024

Lola has never wanted children. At forty, the professor and artist is the only childless one among her close friends, save for one trying to conceive. Then an unplanned pregnancy turns Lola’s plans and expectations upside-down. Written and directed by Liliana Torres (Cities), the thoughtful, nuanced drama Mamífera explores a hot-button topic with delicacy and grace. Intense yet respectful of its subject and characters, Mamífera shows how even for someone who thought her mind was settled, some choices aren’t easy, and what a woman might want more than permission or absolution is understanding.

Festivals Interviews

Alison Tavel on Realizing RESYNATOR (SXSW2024) – Valerie Kalfrin interviews

March 20, 2024 Valerie Kalfrin Alison Tavel, Christian Castagno, documentaries, Fred Armisen, Grace Potter, Kathryn Robson, muscal instrument, Peter Gabriel, Resynator, sxsw audience award, SXSW2024, Tavel

When she started making the documentary Resynator, Alison Tavel imagined she’d introduce viewers to the “super-trippy” synthesizer her late father invented. But once she unpacked the device from storage, she dug up family secrets, such as his depression and insecurities. “There was a moment when I thought I should stop filming,” she said, recalling hearing of her dad’s troubles for the first time. “The narrative was way more personal than I was intending it to be. … [I thought,] ‘I don’t need to show the whole world this.’” She was so unsettled, she phoned her mom, then thought about it some more, realizing, “Maybe this is the story I need to tell.”
Resynator debuted at the 2024 SXSW Film Festival, winning an Audience Award for Feature Documentary.

Festivals Reviews

AUDREY (SXSW2024) – Review by Valerie Kalfrin

March 20, 2024March 23, 2024 Valerie Kalfrin Audrey, australian films, Jackie van Beek, Josephine Blazier, Natalie Bailey, SXSW2024

Dark comedy walks a fine line between satire and offensiveness. The Australian film Audrey lands on the far end of the scale, which might be too much for some viewers. Ronnie is a TV has-been angling to be great again. Teaching acting to elementary-age students, she also lives vicariously through her seventeen-year-old daughter, Audrey, whom she’s enrolled in voice and drama classes. Audrey is an entitled, spiteful brat who insults everyone in the family, perhaps because she wants her own life.

Festivals Reviews

7 BEATS PER MINUTE (SXSW2024) – Review by Valerie Kalfrin

March 19, 2024March 21, 2024 Valerie Kalfrin 7 Beats Per Minute, Dean’s Blue Hole, documentary, Free divers, Jessea Lu, SXSW2024, Yuki Kang

Free divers love Dean’s Blue Hole in the Bahamas, a place to plunge with no current and little wind, tucked within a lagoon surrounded by natural rock on three sides. This spectacular natural phenomenon is more than 600 feet deep. On a world-record attempt diving 93 meters with no air tank, Jessea Lu almost died there. The documentary 7 Beats Per Minute explores Lu’s near-fatal dive and her struggles in the aftermath. Written and directed by Yuki Kang, it’s a portrait of resilience and astonishing determination that perhaps few viewers—certainly those not in competitive sports—can comprehend.

Festivals Reviews

HUNTING DAZE (SXSW2024) – Review by Nadine Whitney

March 19, 2024March 19, 2024 Nadine Whitney Annick Blanc, Hunting Daze, Jour de chasse, Nahéma Ricci, SXSW2024

Hunting Daze utilises dashes of surrealistic imagery and nightmares drenched in blood and pain to make the obvious point that some men are born more equal than others. If they can buy women, they can buy anything. Psychopomps, animal guides, ferocity, and hot pink nail polish are Annick Blanc’s motifs; they create an assured vision of the perpetual damage of misogynistic and racist behaviour. “Mother nature is the only redeemer,” and she is raging.

Festivals Reviews

BACKSPOT (SXSW2024) – Review by Valerie Kalfrin

March 19, 2024March 20, 2024 Valerie Kalfrin Backspot, D.W. Waterson, Devery Jacobs, evan rachel wood, Kudakwashe Rutendo, Noa DiBerto, Shannyn Sossamon, SXSW2024

Backspot invites comparisons to 2014’s Whiplash, among other films featuring ambitious strivers and harsh mentors. But Backspot is more a of character study, showing a teenage cheerleader’s interactions not just with her coach but her girlfriend, her mom, and others. Riley is a backspot—a position on a cheer squad that monitors others for safety and balance during lifts. Incredibly driven, she’s also sympathetic, plucking out her eyebrows in private while she watches phone videos at night of that day’s practice. No one should be this high-strung, let alone a teenager. Overall, Backspot is a portrait of a young athlete that doesn’t stick the landing.

Festivals Reviews

BOB TREVINO LIKES IT (SXSW2024) – Review by Leslie Combemale

March 16, 2024March 16, 2024 Leslie Combemale Barbie Ferriera, Bob Trevino Likes It, French Stewart, John Luguizamo, SXSW2024, Tracie Laymon

The cesspool of catfishing and scamming that is the internet can sometimes actually lead to a transformative and beautiful relationship. Just ask writer/director Tracie Laymon. It is the pitch perfect balance of sweet, bittersweet, and heartbreaking that will grab hold of viewers who watch her semi-autobiographical narrative feature Bob Trevino Likes It. It is about chosen family’s power to heal longstanding trauma, and knowing going into the film it’s inspired by a true story will only make the experience more poignant. In searching the internet for her estranged father, Laymon found a man with the same name, and contacting him sparked the beginning of a deep friendship that helped heal them both.

Festivals Reviews

KRZYK: LOSING CONTROL (SXSW2024) – Review by Leslie Combemale

March 15, 2024March 16, 2024 Leslie Combemale Ewa Wikiel, Gina Henkel, Halina Rasinski, Krzyk: Losing Control, polish films, SXSW2024

Krzyk: Losing Control, is a trippy, tense feature about one woman’s devolution from sanity triggered by layered traumatic experiences. The word Krzyk means scream in Polish, and is an apt name for a film that is often visceral for the viewer, and feels at once like a languid dreamscape and a tightly coiled spring about to explode. The film is unusual in that it doesn’t make the female protagonist particularly sympathetic. This is welcome in a world where women dealing with child loss are so often treated with kid gloves, or presented as martyrs and saints.

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