Acorn

Issue date: 3/28/08 Section: Arts and Leisure

Media Credit: David A.M. Wilensky A South By Southwest 2008 Film Fest schedule outlines films shown during the festival, while a SXSW Film badge shows tally marks representing the 23 films seen by Wilensky.

During spring break, I saw 23 movies. They ranged in genre from epic biopic to cinema verité relationship drama to election documentary. Only three of them sucked and I broke my 3-year-old record of 21 films. Every year, for eight days, a music, film and technology conference called South By Southwest-typically written out as SXSW and pronounced as Southby-turns the entertainment and warehouse districts of Austin, Texas into a madhouse of film buffs and directors, musicians and their fans and Internet startups and moguls. Four days in, when the music portion of the festival starts, streets are cordoned off and taken over by entertainment-addled pedestrians.

The Austin Convention Center is overrun by more Mac products than you can count, panels rage on discussing the future of social networking-my God, what comes after Facebook?-and startup-all-in-one-cutting-edge-browser-mp3-player-e-mail-social-networking-RSS-feedreader developers shove their bumper stickers at you.

Status is determined by badge. At the bottom of the ladder are those wearing SXSW Interactive badges. Next up are music badges-leather and sunglasses are their uniform, and whether they work for a record label or they're just local music fans, they're cooler than you will ever be. At the top, there are platinum badges-these folks have full access to SXSW Music, Film and Interactive and they probably got their company to pay for it.

And then there's me and my kind-the film badge. We're here because there's no other way to see what we're here to see. Take for instance my first film of the week, "Año Uña." This strange film was told through black-and-white photos taken by the director over the course of trips to Mexico, and then rearranged to suggest a fictional story, overlaid with the voices of actors portraying characters created in the act of arranging photos.

Have you ever sat through the Oscars and wondered where the hell these animated shorts and live action shorts come from? I've seen them. At SXSW, they're presented during feature-length screenings.

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