Austin Film Society

The Stateside Independent film series and the Texas Independent Film Network are co-hosting the Austin premiere of the understated comedy Far Marfa, on Monday, February 25, at the Stateside Theatre. The 7 pm screening is already sold out, but tickets are still available for the 9:30 pm slot. This 2011 Texas Filmmakers Production Fund (TFPF) recipient film project features original music by local composer Graham Reynolds (Bernie, Before Midnight). Filmmakers will be in attendance for a post-screening Q&A.

Writer/director Cory Van Dyke currently resides in Marfa, Texas, the west Texas town where this movie is set. Carter Frazier (Johnny Sneed) is just barely hanging onto an existence in a town where not much is needed much to get by. Without money or a job and a girlfriend who's recently moved out, Carter is desperately in need of a wake-up call, which comes from a brief but life-altering encounter with a stranger who turns out to be a famous modern artist, Steve Vincent (Steve Holzer).

Austin Film Society has promised me that the after-party for the Texas Film Hall of Fame Awards this year is going to be a night to remember. The party starts at 9 pm on Thursday, March 7 in Austin Studio Stage 7 -- it actually overlaps a bit with the awards themselves, so you can get in there and start warming things up before the crowd from the awards ceremony fills the room.

DJ el john Selector will provide some great music, with guest DJs Jim Eno (Spoon), Adrian Quesada (Grupo Fantasmo, Brownout) and Graham Reynolds (do I need to tell you Austin film people who he is?). There will be an open bar, and snacks from local businesses (Tiny Pies!). AFS is also promising us "lots of surprises," and when you consider that this after-party is for an event attended by many local and a few national celebrities, that could mean just about anything (in a good way).

I mean, I'm planning to go, and you know what a wuss I usually am about late-night parties, especially the night before a major local film festival for which I need to pace myself to survive.

Slackerwood is giving away two pairs of tickets to the after-party. I'll tell you how to get them after the jump. And if you don't win, you can buy tickets on the AFS website. The proceeds go to the Texas Filmmakers' Production Fund, and if you're a regular Slackerwood reader you don't need me to tell you how many great local movies have benefitted from this fund.

The Middle East continues to be a hotbed of socio-political upheaval, sometimes with cautious hope, more often with sorrow and loss. Nonetheless many of the countries of the region continue to provide a fertile ground for the imagination of filmmakers. In keeping with what has become an Austin Film Society programming tradition, we present our seventh consecutive year of the Essential Cinema series, "Children of Abraham/Ibrahim: Films of the Middle East and Beyond" (Feb 19 – April 9, 2013).

We begin tomorrow night with one of the most important films to come out of Iran, one made by an Iranian filmmaker forbidden to write screenplays, direct movies, discuss cinema publically or travel to other countries for film festivals for a period of 20 years. This Is Not a Film (2011) is Jafar Panahi's answer (and shrill raspberry) to his repressive government's decree.

With the help of his friend and technical assistant Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, Panahi shares a day in his life with us as he talks about the film he was planning to make before his arrest and harsh sentence. He transforms one room of his large apartment into the bedroom of a young woman forced to remain captive in her own home while her parents are away. In a crucial moment in his acting out of the script, Panahi suddenly stops as he finds this exercise frustrating and unfulfilling. Never have we so clearly seen such a creative mind gagged and bound by such an idiotic law charging an artist with demeaning the image of Iran and Islam. Perhaps the point of making this "non-film" is that the attempt to silence his artistry is what demeans the image of the country and the religion. This Is Not a Film is an absolute must-see for all people disturbed by censorship and inspired by unbridled creativity.

Reunite with Simone, Tony, Cynthia, Jodi, Mitch, Benny, Darla, Sabrina, Cynthia and Tommy for a beer-buzzed existential walk down memory lane. Select Dazed and Confused cast members and writer/director Richard Linklater will celebrate the film's 20th anniversary with two screenings and a Q&A with the cast and crew on Wednesday, March 6 at 7 pm and 9:30 pm at The Marchesa Hall & Theatre (6226 Middle Fiskville Rd) in Austin. General admission and VIP tickets go on sale at noon on Friday for Austin Film Society members, and to the public on Thursday, Feb. 21. VIP tickets include access to a party with the film's stars and preferred seating for the screening with the Q&A. 

The film's anniversary screening and party kicks off the celebration: Linklater and a number of the movie's cast members will accept the Star of Texas award for Dazed and Confused at this year's Texas Film Hall of Fame awards gala the day after the anniversary party (Thursday, March 7).

Dazed and Confused takes place during a time when you could haze and humiliate people without the threat of a lawsuit. Bongs blazed, joints were passed and the keg never seemed to run dry. The times they were a'changin' in 1976, and the characters in Linklater's film weren't immune. Their crazy hijinks and adventures of a group of seniors-to-be and incoming high-school freshman on their last day of school is chronicled in this 1993 retrospective. 

Not since American Graffiti has a coming-of-age comedy had such a unique cast of former nobodies, some of whom will be in attendance at the anniversary screening and party. See you at the moontower. 

It seems timely that Austin Film Society (along with the Austin Jewish Film Festival) is screening the movie Koch this Wednesday, February 13 [details]. Former New York City mayor Ed Koch died on the first day of this month; this documentary about his life and times in office from 1978-89 pulls no punches, yet had his approval and participation.

Director Neil Barsky incorporates interviews with members of the media and New York community leaders along with interviews with Koch himself.  Koch zeroes in on his mayoral tenure, but we also learn about his childhood (his family barely got by running a hat-check station) and his post-mayoral doings. He's even shown puttering alone around his apartment. Songs of the period punctuate the documentary, with Oliver Nelson's bouncy jazz work "Complex City" setting the tone from the start. 

Austin Film Society members who are filmmakers have the opportunity to submit their short films to screen during the SXSW Film Festival as part of ShortCase, this year's AFS Community Screening. ShortCase is a 70- to 90-minute special screening of locally connected short films.

THe submitter must be a current AFS Make-level member (or above) and be either a producer, director or writer of the piece submitted -- one of the people most creatively responsible for the work. If you are not currently an AFS member at the Make level, you can join or upgrade here.

I'm curating the ShortCase film series again along with AFS Programs & Operations Manager Ryan Long and Marketing and Events Coordinator Austin Culp. We sincerely hope AFS filmmakers take advantage of the wealth of resources provided through AFS Artists Services, including the Texas Filmmaker Production Fund and Moviemaker Dialogues.

Be aware of a few changes for this year's SXSW ShortCase submission process:

I may not be in Park City, but I am enjoying many aspects of the Sundance Film Festival from the comforts of home (you can too!). Today's vicarious living involves the Texas Party, hosted by the Austin Film Society and Texas Monthly at the height of Sundance festgoing. The party celebrated the number of Lone Star films at this year's Park City fest.

AFS Marketing and Events Coordinator Austin Culp and other photographers to be named later [update: Ryan Long and Chris Cortez] took a number of photos at the event, and I'm amused because if I showed you the photos and didn't tell you where they were taken, you would have assumed it was a filmmaker party here in Austin. Former and current Austinites and Texans were everywhere ... well, admittedly they did seem to be everywhere at Sundance in general this year.

I'm not sure why actor/filmmaker Jonny Mars and producer Kelly Williams appear to be sparring in the above photo. I'll let them tell me sometime. They were at the party shortly before departing for the premiere of Black Metal, which Debbie has detailed in her Sunday dispatch.

I've included more of my favorites below. If that's not enough for you, check out the Texas Party photo set from the event.

Some very familiar faces, whom you might not realize are Texas natives, are among this year's Texas Film Hall of Fame Awards recipients. In addition, a quintessential Austin film will be honored that evening: Dazed and Confused. At a press conference this morning, Austin Film Society Associate Artistic Director Holly Herrick announced the honorees: Stephen Tobolowsky, Robin Wright, Henry Thomas and Annette O'Toole. In addition, actress Julie Hagerty will attend the event to present Tobolowsky's award.

Parker Posey will also be there, to accept the Star of Texas Award for Dazed and Confused. "And I think we may have the director there as well. We'll see," joked Herrick. Richard Linklater, who directed the film and co-founded AFS, was sitting in the front row of the press conference at the time.

Linklater attended the conference to talk about where the funds raised by Texas Film Hall of Fame event go: the Texas Filmmakers Production Fund and to AFS educational programs. The gala is the primary fundraising event for AFS.

This year's awards ceremony will take place on Thursday, March 7 -- the night before SXSW begins.The event is returning to Austin Studios (yay parking!) and will take place in Studio 7. Tickets and tables for the gala and awards dinner are currently on sale via the AFS website. In addition, an after-party will overlap with the awards, and after-party-only tickets will be available for $30 (two for $50) if the gala tickets aren't in your price range.

By Raven Patton

The Austin Film Society was honored late last year by the visit of Ted Hope, who was there to discuss an important matter concerning the creation of a sustainable film community. Ted Hope is an award winning film producer who has had widespread success with several production companies including Good Machine, which went on to become Focus Features, one of the most forward thinking production companies around, and his most recent production company, Double Hope, that he founded with his wife Vanessa Hope. Hope is also the executive director of the San Francisco Film Society.

What exactly does it mean to create a sustainable film community and why is it so important? According to Hope, we are a society that is oversaturated and distracted. At the dawn of the film industry, movies were scarce and controlled. Hope, a self-proclaimed chronic listmaker, says he made a list of four and five-star films that he wants to see before he dies. He stated that if he watched roughly 250 films per year, the list of films would actually reach 8.5 years past his life expectancy. This is a fantastic way of driving home the oversaturation issue. He warned about taking a cue from the music industry, which faced their struggles with sustainability first and urged that we restructure the film industry now before the problem persists.  

Film lovers and outside-the-box horror fans have had their eye on filmmaker Calvin Reeder since his visually stunning, terrifying and absolutely mind-bending short films that made the rounds at Sundance and in midnight-movie sections of festivals around the world. Garnering comparisons to David Lynch, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Luis Buñuel, Reeder is often categorized among directors who are themselves ride the edge of familiar genres. The Oregonian,  Reeder's Sundance-selected first feature film (starring True Blood's Lindsay Pulsipher), looked and felt like it might be a horror movie, but was something else entirely. The film won an aptly titled special award for "Independent Vision" at the 2011 Sarasota Film Festival.

Until this month, Reeder's films had yet to screen here in Austin. On January 11, The Oregonian will have its Austin premiere at the Austin Film Society as part of this month's spotlight on the indie distribution label Factory 25. (Tickets and info here.)

While in the midst of finishing his latest feature film, Calvin took a few minutes to reflect back on the real-life fever dreams that brought The Oregonian to life, he and Lindsay Pulsipher's creative collaboration, and what he expects when his newest, star-studded feature, The Rambler, hits Sundance at the end of this month.

If you want to hear more from Calvin, he'll be joining us via Skype after the AFS screening of The Oregonian. You can also view his short films online: Little Farm, The Rambler and The Snake Mountain Colada.

Holly Herrick: Before making The Oregonian, you had made several great short films (The Rambler, The Snake Mountain Colada) that captured some of the visual themes you explore in the feature, such as terrifying situations of isolation and confusion, people stranded on the roadside, and a strange, colorful interpretation of gore. Would you say that making the shorts compelled you to push yourself narratively to explore these themes further in a feature?

Reeder: I think so, it seems like most ideas I have come in pieces, and it's a struggle to connect them at first. Like in The Rambler short I knew I had this sort of cliché guitar rambler guy and I knew I there had to be a scientist. There was a bunch of other ideas that came with those characters but a lot of those ideas were really just color and sound. I guess it was a feeling I was trying to get out, it was my goal to give people that or something close to that.