Austin Film Society

Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino (Kill Bill, Inglourious Basterds) was at Austin Studios last night to receive an "honorary Texan" award at the 10th annual Texas Film Hall of Fame Awards last night at Austin Studios. This event, hosted by Austin Film Society, is held every year the night before SXSW opens. The 2010 honorees included Michael Nesmith, Quentin Tarantino, Catherine O'Hara, Lukas Haas and Bruce McGill. Proceeds from the Texas Film Hall of Fame Awards benefit the educational and artistic programs of the Austin Film Society, a 501(c)3 organization.

Check out more photos from the event on our Flickr site. And Anne Thompson has posted a video to IndieWire of Tarantino's great acceptance speech.

[Photo credit: Quentin Tarantino, by Debbie Cerda, on Flickr]

South by Southwest Film Festival and Conference is a particularly busy time for the folks over at Austin Film Society (AFS). Their biggest annual event is the Texas Film Hall of Fame Awards, which is being held on Thursday, March 11 at Austin Studios. SXSW Film provides the opportunity for AFS to showcase several of their filmmakers' short films at the Austin Media Arts Committee (AMAC) special screenings at the Hideout. Many AFS Texas Filmmakers Production Fund (TFPF) award winners will also be premiering their films at SXSW, including Austin filmmaker Miguel Alvarez (Mnemosyne Rising).

These SXSW special events couldn't happen without two critical AFS staff members, Agnes Varnum and Bryan Poyser. Agnes has been busy for weeks in preparation of the Texas Film Hall of Fame Awards, and is one of the featured panelists for "How to Rawk SXSW Film." Attendees learn from professionals in the industry how to make meaningful connections with all the independent film and new media professionals in town for the event. Bryan coordinates the AMAC screenings for AFS at the Hideout, hosts a Texas Filmmakers Production Fund Workshop, and as one of my favorite panel moderators is part of the "The Kids are Alright: Jay and Mark Duplass Plus" panel. Even more exciting, Bryan's film Lovers of Hate -- well-received at last month's Sundance Film Festival -- is also screening at SXSW. I caught up to this dynamic duo by email for an interview, and here's what they had to say.

Last year, Slackerwood featured a Guide to Austin Summer Film Camps that listed local day camps for kids interested in making movies. Although Tuesday's snowfall might make you think that summer's far away, it's never too soon to enroll in these highly sought-after programs.

Here are a couple of Austin summer film camps that have already opened registration for this year ... for kids a bit older than the budding filmmaker pictured at right.

Austin Film Festival Summer Film Camp 

Austin Film Festival's Young Filmmakers Program is proud to present the eighth annual Summer Film Camp. The camp offers students unparalleled access to in-depth, personal instruction on screenwriting, filmmaking and claymation from local industry professionals. This year, the camp's workshops and panels will take place at Austin High School.

Austin Film Society is rolling out a new Essential Cinema series starting on Tuesday night: "Smashing the Rules: Films of Oshima Nagisa." The films span a nearly 20-year period in the Japanese director's career. The most notorious in the series is probably the 1976 film In the Realm of the Senses -- I remember being shocked in college when someone told me about a certain explicit scene. But as AFS Director of Programming Nafus tells us, "Every one of his films is like a roller coaster ride through the subterranean areas of the human psyche."

All the films in the Essential Cinema series are on Tuesday nights at 7 pm at Alamo Drafthouse on South Lamar. (Notice the series skips a week during SXSW.) You can get tickets online through the AFS site. While admission is free for AFS members, definitely get your tickets in advance because Essential Cinema screenings tend to fill up quickly. I've listed the films after the jump.

This week, the Blanton Museum of Art opens a new exhibit, "Desire," featuring work by contemporary artists on that theme. Austin Film Society is teaming up with the museum to show four films this month about desire.

The movies will be shown at the Blanton, with discounted admission for AFS members, museum members, and UT students/faculty/staff.

The four movies:

• Sunday, Feb. 7 at 3 pm: L'Avventura, Michelangelo Antonioni's 1960 film
• Sunday, Feb. 14 at 3 pm: Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Pedro Almodovar's crazy, chaotic comedy from 1988, starring Carmen Maura and Antonio Banderas
• Sunday, Feb. 21 at 3 pm: She's Gotta Have It, Spike Lee's first feature film, from 1986
• Sunday, Feb. 28 at 3 pm: Happy Together, the 1997 film from Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai

There is so much I love about being a member of Austin Film Society, but high on my list is the Essential Cinema film series, which often features films that haven't been made widely available in the United States. The latest series, "Children of Abraham/Ibrahim 4: Films of the Middle East and Beyond" provides insights into Middle Eastern history and culture. From Chale Nafus, AFS Director of Programming:

"Our fourth annual series will continue looking at films from the Middle East and beyond -- an area rich in tumultuous history, wonderful art and literature, but often mired in war and misunderstanding among the three religions which all trace their roots back to Abraham/Ibrahim. This is our local attempt to bring human faces and individual stories to the statistics and overwhelming images seen on TV and computer screens daily throughout the world.

"Our four contemporary films and two classics will take us to Egypt, Palestine, Israel, Turkey, and Pakistan. We will see unrequited love in a train station, struggles over ownership of land, the troubles a father has just getting home to a birthday party, a son struggling with his father over education, the ethnic and religious divisions within an Israeli neighborhood, and the lengths to which a politician will go to avoid responsibility for his actions."

The series starts tonight and runs through February 16, and screenings for this month include:

Of all the Austin red carpets and gala events I've been fortunate enough to attend in the past few years, my favorites have been at the annual Texas Film Hall of Fame. The red carpet is actually the entrance to the event, so I not only get to take photos of the honorees, but anyone I recognize who walks in, and sometimes people I don't recognize but who look fabulous, or whom everyone else is photographing. (Then I find out later who they are.) It's a long red carpet with enough room for just about everyone, the lighting is pretty good, and most of the familiar faces are willing to stop and be photographed.

Austin Film Society has just announced three inductees into the Texas Film Hall of Fame for 2010: Quentin Tarantino, Michael Nesmith and Bruce McGill. In addition, actor Thomas Haden Church will again emcee the event -- he did a great job last year, displaying a deadpan and slightly twisted sense of humor.

After the jump, I've added brief explanations of who the honorees are, in case you aren't acquainted with them. The awards ceremony will be on March 11, 2010 (the night before SXSW starts) at Austin Studios. Expect AFS to make a few more announcements about Texas Film Hall of Fame awards and presenters before then.

Here are a few news items related to Austin films and filmmaking from this week. Well, I say "a few," but once I started digging them up, it's actually been a pretty busy week! The news includes updates on local filmmakers' projects, awards, casting news, and other useful info.

• Austin company B-Side Entertainment has just announced that Sundance Film Festival will use the company's scheduling engine for its 2010 online film guide. If you're going to Sundance next year, you'll get to use the very helpful Schedule Genius program to fit all the movies you want to see into the most efficient time possible. B-Side also powers the film guides for local festivals Fantastic Fest, Austin Film Festival, Austin Asian American Film Festival and aGLIFF, and provides an unofficial guide for SXSW.
• Bad news for local filmmaker Richard Linklater (pictured at right): As part of Miramax's big cost-cutting drive this month, they have put his romantic comedy Liars (A to E) on hold. Movieline reports that Linklater doesn't have another project currently in the works yet, although we suspect it won't be long before he's his usual busy self. [via Austin Movie Blog]
• Speaking of Linklater, Austin Film Society would like you to know that tickets are still available to the Austin gala screening of his latest film, Me and Orson Welles, on Monday, November 30 at the Paramount. Linklater will be in attendance along with two of the film's stars, Zac Efron and Christian McKay.

A new video spot produced by the City of Austin features the Austin Film Society After-School Film Program. The video promotes the Grant for Technology Opportunities (GTOPs) program. GTOPs is a City of Austin program that provides matching-fund grants to local groups that create digital opportunities and promote digital inclusion.

The city currently is accepting applications for the 2010 GTOPs cycle. For more information, visit www.gtops.org.

Prospective GTOPs applicants can attend a free seminar today -- Wednesday, Oct. 21 -- at 3 pm. The seminar will explain how the GTOPs program works, and provide assistance for writing a successful grant. Advance reservations may be made at http://gtopsseminar.eventbrite.com/

Austin Film Society starts a new Essential Cinema series tonight: "Censors, Drop Your Scissors! Billy Wilder's Later Comedies." The series runs on Tuesday nights for the next five weeks. I couldn't be more thrilled.

The films scheduled in the series are not the best-known films from writer/director Billy Wilder, like Some Like It Hot, Sunset Blvd., The Apartment, or Double Indemnity. You've probably heard of those and hopefully seen a few of them. These are the films he made after The Apartment, collaborating with his co-writer of the time, I.A.L. Diamond. Some might say Wilder's films declined starting in the mid-1960s  -- you'll have to see all of these films and decide for yourself.

I confess that if I were programming a Wilder retrospective myself, I would be tempted to pick the films Wilder co-wrote with Charles Brackett before starting to direct his own films, those witty, frothy 1930s comedies that I especially love. I'd include Ninotchka, Ball of Fire, Midnight, Bluebeard's Eighth Wife … and possibly some of the more dramatic films that I've never seen, since they're not on DVD, like Arise, My Love and Hold Back the Dawn. (Wilder and Brackett also wrote the first Henry Aldrich film -- a sort of cut-rate Andy Hardy -- called What a Life, which I've not been able to see.)

While Wilder's early screenplays are interesting and certainly entertaining, I appreciate AFS giving us the chance to see the films he made later in life, at a time when the Hollywood Production Code crumbling. Wilder and Diamond pushed the envelope as much as they could in these films, trying to make adult movies about relationships and sex.