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Related Links: Full Coverage from NPR | The Austin 100: A SXSW Mix For 2010 | Free SXSW Music Sampler Real Vocal String Quartet
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Ride, Rise, Roar
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Dead Sexy, Inc.
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Somi
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Ben Glover
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Marianne Dissard
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Health Alliance for Austin Musicians March 29, 2010 ·Carolyn Schwarz is the executive director of Health Alliance for Austin Musicians (HAAM), this innovative organization was the brain child of Robin R. Shivers. Robin Shivers died in 2009 but the Health Alliance continues to thrive and provide free medical care to those who support themselves as musicians in Austin. Audio Player Requires JavaScript Related Links: Eilidh Patterson
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Sambada
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Longital
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Citizen Architect
March 17, 2010 · In the mid-90s, Samuel “Sambo” Mockbee, founded the Rural Studio, a radical educational design/build program in poverty-stricken Hale County, Alabama. “Sambo really felt that his profession, and art and design, could be a lot more socially responsible and have an effect on communities,” says Sam Wainwright Douglas, the director and producer of the documentary Citizen Architect, about Mockbee’s life, the Rural Studio, and the good work being done by a generation of talented young architects and builders. Audio Player Requires JavaScript SXSW Screening:
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Related Links: Dance With The One Official Website Dance With The One on Facebook
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March 17, 2010 · Dance With the One is a powerful story of a young man’s attempts to break free from the life he’s been handed.
Nate (Gabriel Luna), his brother Sitter (Mike Davis), and their father Owen (Gary McCleery), are still in shock following the overdose death of Owen’s wife. Nate agrees to store drugs to earn enough money to set his brother up in a private school, and be free of his father, who’s pretty much ceded that role.
The film is one of the first productions of the University of Texas Film Institute, and was directed by Mike Dolan, and produced by Alex Smith. Texas Public Radio’s Nathan Cone spoke to both of them at the South By Southwest festival in Austin.
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SXSW Screening:
Saturday, March 20, 2:30 p.m., at the Paramount Theatre
The Happy Poet
Bill (Paul Gordon) sets up shop at Austin’s Auditorium Shores.
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Related Links: The Happy Poet Official Website
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March 17, 2010 · A sweet comedy about a sad sack poet trying to open a “mostly vegetarian” food stand, writer/director/actor Paul Gordon says The Happy Poet is also about “kindness and generosity versus looking out for yourself and doing what you need to do to get by.
The Happy Poet is Paul Gordon’s second feature film. Nathan Cone spoke to Paul Gordon, along with the film’s co-stars, Austin residents Johnny Mars and Liz Fisher.
SXSW Screening:
Thursday, March 18, 6:15 p.m. at Alamo Drafthouse Ritz
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When I Rise
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Related Links: When I Rise Official Website
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March 17, 2010 · In 1957, Barbara Smith Conrad was studying music at the University of Texas in Austin. She was cast as Dido in a student production of Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas.
Two weeks before the curtain, Conrad learned that she would not be singing the role of Dido, because a state congressman had objected to an African-American woman being cast opposite a white leading man in a romantic role.
UT’s president, Logan Wilson, bowed to pressure from the state legislature and pulled Conrad from the cast. The national press soon picked up on the story, and popular singer Harry Belafonte offered to pay Conrad’s way to any other school in the world.
Instead, Conrad finished her degree, and went on to great success with the New York City Opera and Metropolitan Opera. Her story is chronicled in the documentary When I Rise.
In this interview, Conrad talks to Texas Public Radio’s Nathan Cone about her experience at the University of Texas, her early life in Center Point, her love of spirituals, and why she eventually came back to Austin.
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Listen to an interview with the Director, and the Executive Producer, of When I Rise, Mat Hames and Dr. Don Carleton.
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Short Film Raises Awareness of Abuse
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March 12, 2010 · Nicole Prian’s film Together Forever opens with a boy and girl arguing in a parked car. Although there’s a brief moment of respite midway through the five minute short, it ends tragically.
Prian is a student at the North East School of the Arts, and wrote, directed, and produced “Together Forever.” It’s paced like a scary movie, but Prian says she her greater purpose is to raise awareness of abusive relationships.
“It’s basically telling the audience that there…relationships within teenagers my age where there are abusive actions going on without the parents knowing,” Prian says. “I think it’s a huge issue right now that a lot of kids… think that [abuse] is normal within relationships.”
SXSW Screening Times:
Saturday, March 13, 5:00 p.m., at Austin’s Carver Center
Saturday, March 20, 11:30 a.m., at the Alamo Drafthouse S. Lamar
Two Short Films by St. Mary’s Hall Students to Screen at SXSW
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March 12, 2010 · Two films by high school students at St. Mary’s Hall will be screened at this year’s South By Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival in Austin, Texas. “Give the Dog a Bone” is about a mad scientist that cooks something up for his pets with humorous results, and “The Sleep Project” is a mini-documentary about our sleep deprived society. For that film, St. Mary’s Hall student Harneet Kaur voluntarily went without sleep for 72 hours.
“She went bonkers,” says fellow student Whitney Bennett, who also worked on the film. “[During the experiment], there was a point where she was talking about nothing….she just got really paranoid, and annoyed at random things.” Bennett says the resulting footage of Harneet worked well in the film, which also incorporates interviews with local sleep specialists.
The Sleep Project was completed last fall as part of the Advanced Digital Video class at St. Mary’s Hall.
For the second year in a row, a stop-motion animated film from St. Mary’s Hall was also chosen by the SXSW film committee. “Give the Dog a Bone” was the final project of last year’s spring 2009 class. The students were constantly challenged throughout the six-month long production, from jostling the tiny set they were shooting on, to accidentally decapitating their clay figures.
Will Underwood, the students’ teacher, says the time constraints of the school day made these films different from any other shoot. “Anybody who’s worked on productions knows you really want to have [the students] for twelve hours a day, and you can’t really do that, and there are a lot of other academic pressures.”
And Matthew Cunningham, who worked on both "Give a Dog a Bone" and "The Sleep Project," says, after many long nights, he’s happy South By Southwest is recognizing their work at this year’s festival.
“We would be in the room at 8:00 editing the thing, and it’s, like, ‘Is this working at all?’ So it’s surprising and exciting [to be accepted to SXSW], all at the same time.”
Film credits: Matthew Cunningham, Whitney Bennett, Harneet Kaur, Thomas Celo, Kamal Hakim, Edward Kelly, and Brendan Cicoria.
SXSW Screening Times:
Saturday, March 13, 5:00 p.m., at Austin’s Carver Center.
Saturday, March 20, 11:30 a.m., at the Alamo Drafthouse S. Lamar
