Women filmmakers with big dreams shine through The A.V. Clubs coverage of the SXSW that wasn’t – The A.V. Club

From left: Freeland, She Dies Tomorrow, I Used To Go Here

Normally, there are two ways to cover a film festival. One is to treat it like any other work week, responsibly blocking out time to get all your writing done and going to bed at a reasonable hour. The other is to push your body to its limit, getting up for early-morning press screenings and then staying out partying or, as one might put it to oneself, networkinguntil last call. The approach you choose is between you, your deadlines, and your editor, should you start missing those deadlines. But this years SXSW left attendees little choice in the matter, by becoming the first in a series of film-industry dominoes to fall after a forceful push from COVID-19.

And sure, you could stay up all night drinking alone in your apartment and then drag yourself out of bed and run to the living room at 8 a.m. to watch another film. But thats a punishing routine under normal circumstances. And in an environment where waking up with a slight tickle in your throat is enough to send many into a panic spiral, being exhausted with a hangover is less than appealing. And so, after a whirlwind series of events that started with the SXSW cancellation and ended with The A.V. Clubs parent company sending us home to work remotely for the foreseeable future, we found ourselves self-quarantining with a pile of online screeners. And so, the lonely, cozy, unventful remote watch party hereby dubbed Couch x Couchwest was born.

Not every film from SXSW is being made available for online review: Some are holding out for festivals scheduled for the summer and fall, and others are still figuring out what they want to do. And it is a risk to move forward with remote coverageif a film is reviewed that very few people are able to see, how does that affect its reception when it does finally become available to the public? Honestly, nobody is sure right now. This is an unprecedented situation for festival programmers and publicists and critics, as it is for everyone else.

From where The A.V. Club sits, the films that would have been our marquee reviews coming out of SXSWthe world premiere of David Lowerys The Green Knight, for example, or the Kumail Nanjiani-Issa Rae vehicle The Lovebirdsdo not need our remote coverage. But then there are the small indie films that had pinned their creative dreams on a SXSW premiere, films that normally depend on sites like ours to amplify them in festival coverage. Those are the films that are jumping into the unknown and uploading screeners to the online library SXSW created last week, and we hope that we can help their creators out by shining a little light on these otherwise rudderless films.

We watched 11 feature films in total for Couch x Couchwest, both through the SXSW portal and via email submissions. In the end, a handful stood out, all of which happened to be directed or co-directed by women. And so we decided to run with it, becausealthough the worlds mind is on other things right nowit is still Womens History Month. Add these films to your watch list, for warmer and freer days ahead.

Had SXSW gone forward, Kris Reys (formerlyKrisSwanberg) fourth feature I Used To Go Here (Grade: B) would have been hailed as a breakout comedy akin to last years buzziest SXSW title, Olivia Wildes Booksmart. This film is less self-consciously progressive than Wildes, though, and although it does feature a clique of effortlessly cool college kids including the dorky, aptly named Tall Brandon (Brandon Daley)this time theyre not at the center of the story. That distinction belongs to Kate (Gillian Jacobs), a 35-year-old writer whose life seems enviable on the outside: She just published her first novel, complete with a smug nod to her domestic bliss on the dust jacket. The thing is, in the time between Kate penning that bio and now, her fiancee dumped her. Adding insult to injury, the book is selling so poorly that her publisher cancels her book tourand thats before a negative New York Times review sinks any possibility of a rebound. Oh, and she hates the cover art.

In short, Kate is vulnerable, leading her to accept an invitation from her undergraduate writing teacher David (Jemaine Clement) to come give a talk at her old college in downstate Illinois. Adulation from a handful of starry-eyed undergrads isnt enough to satiate Kates neediness, however, and so she entangles herself in a very messy love triangle with Hugo (Josh Wiggins), the teenager who now lives in her old house. The setup is vaguely reminiscent of Old School, but the execution is more in line with Young Adult, full of sharp dialogue lampooning male sexual entitlement and subtle visual gags that underline Kates immaturity as well as the existential absurdity of her dilemma. (A scene where she holds up her book next to a lineup of friends posing with their pregnant bellies is equally cringeworthy and hilarious.)

But while Reys screenplay sets her up for success, its Jacobs who makes it sparkle, playing Kate with enough confidence that she comes across as a real, flawed human being and not an aw-shucks caricature of a mess. Like many comedies, visually I Used To Go Here isnt especially memorable. But Rey and Jacobs more than make up for it with charm and painfully relatable wit, and backed by a producing team of indie all-stars that includes Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer, and Jorma Tacconea.k.a. The Lonely Islandtheres still hope of this film hitting theaters when they reopen.

In a funhouse reversal of this dynamic, She Dies Tomorrow (B+)another auteur effort pairing two indie-film darlings, Upstream Color and Pet Sematarys Amy Seimetz and frequent Alex Ross Perry collaborator Kate Lyn Sheilhas inventive, invigorating visual panache to spare, even when its screenplay is enigmatic to the point of obfuscation. The film opens with a quarantine-worthy scenario, as Amy (Shiel) putters around her house, picking out and putting on a sequin gown as bombastic classical music blares in the background before shopping for leather jackets (and, more curiously, cremation urns) online. When her concerned friend Jane (Jane Adams) comes by and finds Amy blankly standing in her backyard holding a leaf blower, we learn two key details: Amy is an alcoholic whos fallen off the wagon, and shes gripped by the unshakeable, eerily calm belief that she will die the next day.

The origins and function of this belief riff on a cosmic version of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers by way of It Follows, as everyone who Amy encounters catches this belief likewell, like a virus. The pandemic here is existential and emotional, as first Jane, then everyone she meets, is visited by a psychedelic onslaught of color, sound, and pummeling strobe light. Its sort of like being abducted by aliens while high on LSD, and it turns all who see and hear it into hollow shells of doom. And thats totally terrifying and disorienting, an effect that builds until Michelle Rodriguez intoning about death next to a swimming pool slowly filling up with blood seems about right for the situation. The film does lose its way a bit as it wanders through vast expanses of dread in search of an ending. But in terms of originality, Seimetzs second feature-length outing as a writer-director (her first, Sun Dont Shine, debuted at SXSW in 2012) is unmatched in the films we watched for this years virtual fest.

Meanwhile, with the gorgeous, misty hills of Northern California adding priceless production value, writer-directors Mario Furloni and Kate McLeans Freeland (B) was without a doubt the most visually accomplished of the bunch. Krisha Fairchildthe same Krisha who lent her name to Trey Edward Shults debut, Krisha (2015)stars as Devi, a Humboldt County pot farmer struggling to keep up with the complicated bureaucratic tangle of legalization. Riding the line between drama and thriller as Devis predicament becomes more dire, Freeland depends even more heavily on its lead performance than I Used To Go Here. Mainly, thats because its screenplay falters in its attempts to expand Devis world beyond the films core conflict. But Fairchild is magnificent in the role, giving a layered performance that evokes deep pathos for this woman left behind now that the communal values once associated with her crop of choice have been replaced by the capitalist power structures she retreated to the hills to escape in the first place.

Growing pot in the mountains far away from the prying eyes of the law is one version of the American dream. Another is changing the face of a quintessentially American junk food, like the subject of Alice Gus documentary The Donut King (B-). As an energetic montage at the beginning of the film states, Los Angeles has a much higher percentage of donut shops than any other city in the U.S.one for every 7,000 residents, as opposed to the national average of one per 30,000. And almost all of those donut shops are owned by Cambodian people, whose market dominance is so complete that even East Coast staple Dunkin Donuts struggled to break into Southern California in the 90s.

Remarkablyalmost miraculouslythis is all the work of one man: Ted Ngoy, who sponsored hundreds of refugees to come to the U.S. and gave them turnkey loans to run their own donut shops in the 70s and 80s. The first part of Gus documentary celebrates Ngoy, as well as the ingenuity and tireless work ethic of immigrants in general, with a vivid hybrid of biographical documentary and food porn set to colorful animation and a hip-hop beat. In fact, The Donut King plays much like an extended episode of Ugly Delicious, before diving into darker territory in its second half that actively dismantles the myths it spent the first hour building. And although this abrupt turn destabilizes the films structure in a way it never quite recovers from, it also makes The Donut King much more than simple food pornnot that theres anything wrong with that, particularly when creative, mouthwatering treats like cronuts and emoji donuts are so lovingly showcased.

The Donut King is just one of several women-helmed documentaries about dreamers struggling against impossible odds screening virtually through SXSW: Film fans will find Cathryne Czubek and Hugo Perezs Wakaliwood documentary Once Upon A Time In Uganda of special interest. And for music fans theres Dark City Beneath The Beat, a stylish exploration of Baltimores club underground from director TT The Artist, as well as Tomboy, a documentary following four female drummers from different generations by Lindsay Lindenbaum.

Its surreal to think about how quickly such simple pleasures as going out for a donut or sitting down in a crowded movie theater have disappeared from the daily lives of so many people around the world. And as the industry adapts to the new normal of social distancing and shelter in place orders, its the scrappy ground-up filmmakers who are most at risk of having their already unstable livelihoods decimated. The future of SXSW itself is uncertain at this point, as the festival lays off employees amid a reported $355 million loss for the city of Austin following the cancellation of this years festival. But the dream of standing in the front of that crowded theater, taking in the applause that marks the culmination of years of hard work? SXSW or no SXSW, pre-or post-COVID-19, thats going to be difficult to destroy.

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Women filmmakers with big dreams shine through The A.V. Clubs coverage of the SXSW that wasn't - The A.V. Club