March 14, 2006
We're at the halfway point now; all the films have played at least once, and the awards are being announced as I write this (I'm rooting for a film that made it onto my top ten list last year). We'll be heading out to the closing night party in a a few minutes, and then getting up bright and early to continue on for another five days. Old Joy is no longer the best film I've seen - but ranks seem arbitrary at this point, when there are so many pictures of such wildly divergent qualities. I've only caught one bad apple thus far, and it was so innocuous that I can't muster much ill will about it (oh wait - now that I'm thinking about it, maybe I can).
Cut to several hours later. None of the films I was rooting won any awards (although Slam Planet, the documentary I did titles and animation for, and which I haven't managed to catch a screening of yet, was the runner-up in its category).
The closing night party was huge; what was last year crammed into a single bar now pushed the confines of an entire downtown warehouse, inside and out. We managed to find all our friends in the crowd, some of whom wondered if the days of SXSW being an underground-friendly film festival might be coming to an end. I don't think the programming this year necessarily supports that case, but there's no denying that the festival is expanding at an exponential rate; at one of his introductions, Matt Dentler noted that attendance was up by over 50 percent, a number corroborated by the crowds for just about every screening we've been to.
Case in point: Kat had to turn away a few hundred people from the premier of jumping off bridges this weekend. We were among them (luckily, it's playing again on Thursday, and in a bigger theater).
I promise that at some point soon, I'll start writing about the films themselves. Until then, I've got four hours of sleep to grab and a particularly exciting lineup to look forward to tomorrow.
Posted by David Lowery at March 14, 2006 08:59 PM