AFF

Writer/director Dax Shepard, cinematographer/director David Palmer and producer Nate Tuck were on the red carpet for the premiere of Brother's Justice at AFF 2010. The trio were also the stars of this mockumentary about Shepard's efforts to delve into the martial arts genre, although Palmer is most often behind the camera as "the camera guy." It's the natural relationship between Shepard and Tuck as they try to enlist more people in their project that I enjoyed the most. Check back soon for my interview with Shepard, Palmer and Tuck.

Here are more photos from the event, including the cast and crew of the short film The Legend of El Limbo, which preceded Brother's Justice. First up is star Dax Shepard.

Take a classic slasher setup, a bunch of young people isolated in the woods, and turn the trope on its overly predictable ear and you get the indie horror film I Didn't Come Here to Die by Austinite Bradley Scott Sullivan.

With one of the best ever taglines ("Volunteer work is a killer"), Sullivan's screenplay takes a small group of "Volunteers of American Generating Goodwill" out to a remote location to start work on what will eventually be campgrounds for underprivileged urban youth. As the first team to work on the project, they're roughing it in tents, with no phone service, and supposedly, no alcohol and no fraternization. All the rules in place are for safety's sake, but once rules start being broken, everything and everyone starts down a slippery, bloody slope.

Austin Film Festival is over for another year, but we're still covering it. And now that official photos from AFF are available for the panels related to By Way of Helena, here they are. Above are DB Sweeney and Jeff Fahey, who took the lead roles during Friday's script reading.

The above photo of Casino Jack director George Hickenlooper, with actor Jon Lovitz, was taken on Thursday night at the Paramount. Hickenlooper and Lovitz were in town for the Austin Film Festival closing-night film and party -- red carpet beforehand, Q&A afterward, you know the drill.

Hickenlooper then headed to Denver to screen Casino Jack at the Denver Starz Film Festival. Sadly, George Hickenlooper died in Denver on Saturday morning. He was 47 years old. His filmography also includes Factory Girl, Mayor of the Sunset Strip, the short Some Folks Call It a Sling Blade (on which the feature Sling Blade was based) and the documentary Hearts of Darkness about the making of Apocalypse Now.

I can't say anything better than Moises Chiullan does over at Badass Digest, and I urge you to go read his column about the director. Chiullan was friends with Hickenlooper and had planned to work with him on a Hearts of Darkness commentary track.

One of the best things about attending film festivals is that while seeing a lot of interesting films, you also learn a lot of interesting things. For example, thanks to the intriguing documentary The Spirit Molecule, I now know that dimethyltryptamine is one hell of a great drug.

Better known as DMT, dimethyltryptamine is the subject of Austin filmmaker Mitch Schultz's über-trippy examination of a drug found in nearly every living organism and considered the world's most powerful psychedelic. Combining stunningly psychedelic animation with thoughtful interviews, The Spirit Molecule is a paean to psychedelic drug use that also asks a lot of questions about the nature of human consciousness.

The long-suffering city of Port Arthur, Texas has a love-hate relationship with the oil industry. Without the industry's refinery jobs, Port Arthur probably would cease to exist, and its residents would be hard pressed to find other employment in a regional economy based almost entirely on petrochemicals. But Port Arthur residents also pay a high price for their reliance on oil, because the industry that sustains them also poisons many of them.

Shelter in Place is a poignant and often enraging look at Port Arthur's poorest residents, who see few benefits from the oil-based economy while suffering almost all of its consequences. The 48-minute-long documentary by British filmmaker Zed Nelson, which screened at Austin Film Festival in partnership with The Texas Observer, is the sort of angrily effective agit-prop film that every anti-regulatory, free-enterprise preaching Texas politician should see, but surely won't.

The film focuses on the hapless inhabitants of Carver Terrace, a decaying Port Arthur neighborhood surrounded by refineries. Carver Terrace often experiences "upsets," an industry term for the release of toxic chemicals such as benzene into the air to relieve pressure in refinery pipes and avoid potential disasters. Upsets can last for many hours and contribute heavily to air pollution, but despite their alarming frequency (there were 13,000 upsets in Texas in 2007 alone), they're perfectly legal in Texas as long as the refineries report them to state environmental regulators.

It was Ladies Night last night at Austin Film Festival. The most anticipated film of the festival, Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan, played to a packed house with several people giving standing ovations when the credits rolled, despite no guests being in attendance.

Well, that's not entirely true. Ballet Austin's Artistic Director Stephen Mills helped AFF Film Program Director Kelly Williams introduce the film about a ballerina living her dream as a nightmare. Black Swan is a powerful, haunting and incredibly beautiful film won the hearts of the entire audience, critics and fans alike.  If you enjoyed the classic film The Red Shoes, you are going to love Black Swan.

A very different movie followed, but another all about the women.  Made in Dagenham is the story of the 1968 Machinists strike in the UK when women at a Ford plant outside London got fed up with getting less than half the wages men would for the same job. It's typical UK feel-good fare of the kind that audiences will eat up even with a film that telegraphs every move, especially those of us at a certain age and the female persuasion. Sally Hawkins will get robbed if she doesn't at least get a BAFTA for her performance as the housewife/factory worker who finally stands up for herself. Hearing a couple of women in the bathroom crowing "We've come a long way baby," then suddenly realizing we're still not there yet, proved Made in Dagenham is a relevant film, and well as the adage that reminds us that well-behaved women rarely make history.

When Main Street screened last Thursday at Austin Film Festival, Horton Foote's daughter Hallie introduced the movie, saying that her father was 92 when he wrote this screenplay. Foote's last screenplay is based in Durham, North Carolina. Durham, at least the way the movie depicts it, is dealing with recession and low tourism numbers, and their young folks are migrating to bigger cities.

Ellen Burstyn plays Georgiana Carr, whose father once ran a tobacco dynasty. She lives in the grand old family home, which is practically a separate character in the film, and has recently rented out her former tobacco warehouse -- now empty -- to somewhat-shady Texan Gus Leroy (Colin Firth, whose accent sounds nothing like Texan). The film starts the evening after she has made the deal with him, as she frets in her living room and calls her niece Willa (Patricia Clarkson, the saving grace of this film). They eventually discover what Leroy is storing in the warehouse: toxic waste. What will this mean for the town?

Opening-night gala events at film festivals are not always as fabulous as they might sound. Personally, I like to go find the counterprogrammed movies and watch those instead -- no crowded red carpets, no expectations, and usually you end up seeing the opening-night film in a theater soon anyway. But Austin Film Festival, with its focus on writing, usually doesn't pick an opening-night movie that will be opening in theaters with the month, but rather something less obvious and more interesting.

It might seem curious for a festival with a focus on writing to select a documentary for its opening-night film, but once you've seen the documentary, it makes sense. Exporting Raymond is about Everybody Loves Raymond creator/writer Phil Rosenthal's journeys to Russia to create a Russian version of the popular TV sitcom. It is in the style of a personal essay and is heavily sprinkled with writer/director Rosenthal's comic observations.

There's a lot of buzz about the script reading for the raucously funny The Hand Job on Sunday at the Rollins Theatre with Bill Hader, Colin Hanks, Jessica Alba and others. But earlier during the conference, AFF held another, quieter script reading on Friday in the stuffy little Maxmillian Room at the Driskill. What for? By Way of Helena, a twisty western revenge thriller as yet to be produced. 

Earlier in the day, screenwriter Matt Cook participated in the Black List panel, as his screenplay for By Way of Helena was voted one of the best unproduced screenplays of 2009 on The Black List. Immediately following, Black List founder Franklin Leonard introduced Cook for a reading of his script.  Helping Cook was an eclectic mix of well known and lesser known actors.  The entire lineup at the front of the room, in order, was Cook, Jason Newman (Silas, Clem), Lauren Wolf (Maria), Richard Dillard (Saul, Governor Ross), Yesenia Garcia (Marisol), DB Sweeney (David), Jeff Fahey (Abraham), Savannah Welch (Naomi), Karl Anderson (Isaac), Shannon McCormick (George) and John Spong (Narrator).