We dive into the screen programme of SXSW’s second London edition, which returns to Shoreditch in the first week of June.
SXSW London returns for its second edition this June, bringing its multifaceted tangle of film, TV, music, technology and culture back to East London. This year, the festival has made things a little easier by centralising its campus around the Truman Brewery, while also dividing the Screen Festival into six strands: Headliners, Competition, Heartwarmers, Collisions, Shivers and Visionaries. In practical terms, that means a mixture of prestige premieres, global discoveries, genre oddities, crowd-pleasers and various uncategorisable items.
The Screen Festival kicks things off with the Headliners strand, which includes Peter Glanz’s Savage House, a satirical takedown of the upper classes starring Richard E. Grant and Claire Foy. High on our list is Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, a psychosexual horror starring Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson and directed by Jane Schoenbrun, whose previous work (I Saw The TV Glow, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair) has already secured them a place among the most interesting filmmakers working in the haunted space between screen and identity. On the more literary end of the spectrum, Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day promises an un-romantic comedy of love and astronomy based on Woolf’s novel.
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Elsewhere, the programme’s genre offerings look pleasingly rich. In the Shivers strand, The Night looks like one for lovers of folk-horror, with Paul Urkijo Alijo’s 17th-century Basque Country tale bringing witches into the spotlight. The Visionaries strand, meanwhile, offers Amoeba, the debut feature from Siyou Tan, which centres on a new student at an elite all-girls school, who decides that fitting in is less appealing than forming a girl gang. Another Visionaries film that looks promising is Embers, a pitch-black Chinese drama in which a crematorium worker mixes up two sets of ashes with deadly consequences, which is exactly the sort of exciting premise that makes programme-browsing worthwhile.
Despite its cosy title, the Heartwarmers strand appears to contain at least a few thorns. The Invite is likely to be one of the big crowd-pullers, with Olivia Wilde directing and starring alongside Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton in what is billed as an emotionally honest portrait of human relationships. Over in Collisions, Winter of the Crow brings Lesley Manville to Cold War-era Warsaw for a tense thriller based on a story by Nobel Prize-winning author Olga Tokarczuk, while David Pablos’ On the Road trails a young sex worker who falls for an older truck driver while on the run. In Competition, The Red Hangar looks like a strong contender, as a Chilean thriller set during the military coup, centred on an Air Force Captain forced to choose between duty and morality.
On the TV side, the most SXSW-sounding Headliner is Get Jiro, an animated adaptation of Anthony Bourdain’s graphic novel which asks the noble question: how far would you go for good food? Also in the Headliners strand is a special screening of the Rivals mid-series finale, followed by a cast and crew panel promising a spoiler-filled dive into media empires and Cotswolds entanglements. If space in the diary allows, The Playoffs also sounds worth a look, following a former Brazilian football star turned agent as he attempts to outrun the militia, and himself.
SXSW is known for programming a great slate of documentaries, and this year’s selection seems especially promising. Remake sees renowned documentarian Ross McElwee grieving the death of his son by examining a life captured on screen. Memory, Vladlena Sandu’s feature-length debut, blends documentary and dreams as the director revisits a childhood shaped by Crimea, Chechnya and war. Marc By Sofia marks Sofia Coppola’s first documentary, turning her camera towards her long-time friend and collaborator Marc Jacobs. Feast or Famine keeps things local, following East London’s Angelina restaurant as it chases its first Michelin star, with narration from Marco Pierre White. Music fans, meanwhile, have James: Getting Away With It, the first authorised documentary about the Manchester band who have a long and wild history.
The Screen Conference also has plenty for those interested in how film and TV actually get made. Russell T Davies and Sharon Horgan headline as two of television’s most distinctive writer-producers, while NEON founder Tom Quinn should be a major draw for cinephiles interested in the distribution company behind films such as Parasite and Anora. Mia Bays, artistic director of the BFI Filmmaking Fund, brings a key UK independent film perspective, while Anthony and Joe Russo offer the other end of the scale, franchise cinema and with a keen insight into creating streaming spectacles.
And because this is SXSW, the screen programme is only part of the festival’s offerings. The wider conference includes strands on creativity in the algorithmic age, virtual worlds, AI and the creator economy, while the music festival promises artists drawn from Nigeria’s drill scene, British post-punk and electronic music. There is much more to see and the full film and wider SXSW programmes can be found here in one integrated programme.
To see the full SXSW London programme and to book tickets, visit sxswlondon.com.
