The following films played Saturday, March 10th as part of the SXSW Film Festival:

Campaign - This Japanese doc follows the travails of a "parachute" candidate for the Kawasaki city council. He's called that because he moved to the city specifically to run for office through his allegiance to the powerful LDP party. Japan is as big a character as the candidate, as the candid shots of life there offer revealing snippets of the ultra-modern yet amazingly traditional society. The candidate's working wife must refer to herself as "housewife" in order not to offend, older politicos badger and chastise him for not bowing properly, and other party politicians get petty and territorial. While it's about 20 minutes too long, we loved learning the differences (and the similarities) between our elections and theirs. Politics may be murky, but this doc benefits from strong source material and a sympathetic protagonist. He may be flawed, but you want him to succeed. Recommended.

Next showing: Tuesday @ 1:30pm (Alamo S. Lamar), Friday @ 1:30pm (Alamo S. Lamar).

The Ten - David Wain's ten-sketch comedy loosely based on The Ten Commandments defines hit-and-miss. Segments on a parachuting accident, a Mexican vacation, and a CAT-scan battle just kill, while others like a bad doctor on trial just don't connect with an audience with high comedic expectations. The cast is stellar, and kudos go to Liev Schreiber especially for shattering his 'serious Broadway actor' veneer by making an ass of himself here. Paul Rudd stars as the narrator but doesn't have a lot to do, and other notables include a puppet-loving Winona Ryder and all cast members from The State. Overall, we enjoyed the film - when you're in a good segment, you'll really laugh often. We just wish all of the segments were as genius as the best of them. Recommended.

Next showing: None. Opens in Austin in August.

Everything's Gone Green - Very Garden State meets Office Space, this one. This Canadian export mines late 20's angst and dating dilemmas to great effect thanks to very good lead actors and a script from "Generation X" author Douglas Coupland. It's great to see a movie this Canadian - people say "sorry" and "aboot," Vancouver looks amazing, and it reminds you that our North American neighbor is quite different from us. Paulo Costanzo (Road Trip) and Steph Song both give breakout performances here in roles that could become trite or cliched in lesser hands, and you'll likely see more of both of them in the near future. The story also hangs together thanks to generous doses of comedy between the serious bits. All told, Coupland works this tricky genre to positive and original effect here. Recommended.

Next showing: None. Opens in Austin in late April.

David Wain image via TheTenMovie.com. Photographer uncredited.

The jet lag had just started to wear off (or the booze just started to kick in) when most of the filmmakers, actors and bloggers who are showcasing work during The 2007 SXSW Film Festival & Conference met at Buffalo Billiards Thursday night.

Film gets kicked off today, with Scott Frank's directorial debut, The Lookout debuting at The Paramount tonight at 9:00pm.

L to R: Dan Cox, director of Running With Arnold & Reginald Harkema, director of Monkey Warfare.

Of all the awesome-looking films playing at SXSW this year, Frownland initially caught our eye because, well, any reference to Captain Beefheart is awesome. And after checking out some clips on the film's website, we immediately added it to our schedule. This kind of film scratches us right where we itch-- it's that sort of bleak, acerbic comedy that makes you laugh while simultaneously making you feel weird about laughing.

Director Ronald Bronstein has described the film to us as "a miserablist sort of comedy about an excruciatingly irritating and inarticulate young man, chronicling several days in his life as he pingpongs from one damaged rapport to the next". Bronstein went on to say, "The goal of the movie, I guess, is to sort of keep the audience disoriented in terms of how they feel about him...encouraging disdain but then leaving just enough room to question it and wonder whether sympathy might be appropriate. It both wants you to laugh at him and then feel uneasy about it."

Bronstein also suggested to us that the film will resonate with fans of early Mike Leigh films, so if you're into that kind of questionably misanthropic comedy (which we definitely are), you should check Frownland out.

[Add Frownland to Your Calendar on our (Unofficial) SXSW Film Other Side Guide]
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Michael Tully came of age at the North Carolina School of the Arts, where he made friends with such latter-day indie stars as director David Gordon Green and songwriter Dave Berman. His documentary, Silver Jew, about Berman's band The Silver Jews and their recent tour in Israel, is set to screen during SXSW. We caught up with him via email to ask the tough questions:

So the documentary is only 51 minutes long. Does that even count as a feature? Any plans to sell the film to, say, IFC or PBS as an hour Hannukah special?

These days--at least for festival purposes--over forty minutes is considered a feature. When we went to Israel, we had no idea what we were gonna end up with, though my stomach always told me an hour was just about right. For a film like this, our chances of a television sale increase exponentially by having a running time of just under an hour. That said, of course we're hoping to make a TV sale to someone like IFC or PBS! The film doesn't address Hannukah specifically, though it is a hopeful story about faith so I'd love to see it aired during Hannukah, or Christmas, or Kwanzaa for that matter.

One of the films we're really excited about seeing at this year's SXSW Film Festival is A Lawyer Walks Into a Bar..., a broad, lighthearted look at America's obsession with (and simultaneous hatred of) lawyers and lawsuits. The film follows six law students as they prepare for the notoriously difficult California Bar Exam, but it also features stories and commentary from several notable lawyers, comedians and personalities including Eddie Griffin, Robert Shapiro (counsel to O.J. Simpson), Senator John Cornyn and one of our favorite comedians ever, Michael Ian Black.

We recently had a chance to talk to director Eric Chaikin about lawyers, perseverance and moral responsibility.

The film follows six people who are trying to pass the California Bar Exam. But is the film a character study, or is it about something more broad?

It weaves two elements together. It’s probably best described as an overall look at our kind of love/hate relationship with Lawyers and with suing each other in America. And the kind of character thread of that—let’s say half the film, or more than half, does follow these people who are trying to be lawyers, and you learn about their motivations and their situations and what they have to go though to pass this test, and it’s a pretty straightforward character study. You hook onto sympathetic or unsympathetic things about them, and you wind up really rooting for them.

But it’s framed in the context of the media images of lawyers that we see, and of lawyer jokes, and of what people say about lawyers though man-on-the-street interviews. And so we kind of interplay America’s perception of lawyers with the, just kind of real people trying to get to be lawyers.

I’m interested to see it, because I often wonder why anyone would want to be a lawyer. I mean, it’s a job where you have to work incredibly hard, but there isn’t the same social reward as, say, if you were to become a doctor. People don’t generally respect lawyers the way they respect other professions on that same level.

That’s the “necessary evil” component of the whole Lawyer discussion. One of the things that motivated the project was that there are all of these stats out there about how sort of “in distress” lawyers are. Overall, the statistics for things like depression and alcoholism and divorce are much higher for lawyers.

Now, a lot of times when we say “lawyers”, we really mean corporate lawyers. And the characters don’t necessarily…I mean, we’ve got a character who’s going to be a corporate lawyer, we’ve got a character who’s going to be an activist, we’ve got a guy trying to be a public defender—so there are lots of different types of lawyers. But a lot of the stress people talk about is among corporate lawyers, and that negative perception.

We should probably preface this whole thing by saying that we absolutely love Don McKellar. And not in a cute, innocent, forgivable way—in a nerdy, fawning, obsessive kind of way. And so while much of the following interview does relate directly to Reg Harkema’s new film Monkey Warfare (which Don is in, and which will be screening at SXSW), we also couldn’t resist occasionally veering way off topic, randomly blurting out years worth of pent-up questions, and unsuccessfully trying to convince Don to move to Austin. Please forgive us.

For those of you who don’t know, Don McKellar is one of Canada’s most well-respected director/writer/actors. The multi-talented McKellar has written, directed or acted in countless award-winning films including Last Night, Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould and The Red Violin. But he’s also found success outside the film world, hosting a radio show on Canada’s CBC Radio, co-writing the Tony Award winning musical The Drowsy Chaperone and starring in the cult TV series Twitch City (a brilliant anti-sitcom about an agoraphobic television addict named Curtis).

In Monkey Warfare (named after a term Abbie Hoffman used in Steal This Book), Don stars along with his real-life girlfriend Tracy Wright as a pair of ex-revolutionaries living an underground existence in Toronto’s Parkdale neighborhood. The pair—who survive by selling garage sale treasures on the internet—meet a feisty young radical named Susan whose own revolutionary tendencies begin to threaten their safety.

We recently had a chance to chat with Don about Monkey Warfare, Twitch City and the indestructibility of television.

So the film is about a group of revolutionaries…

It’s not so much a group as a couple—me and my girlfriend, who is played by Tracy Wright. It’s sort of unclear, but we were sort of radicals who are living off the grid now in Toronto. Radicals, activists who are sort of “on the lam”.

Is it ever made clear what sort of activists you are?

Kind of, yeah. But that’s why I’m being so coy. It’s sort of revealed later on. I don’t want to give away too much. But at the beginning, all that you know is that we’re sort of living a strange life, off the grid, making money selling things on eBay, without a phone and without any connections to the civilized world. Well, we have a house and everything, but you know.

I ask because it seems like there isn’t a lot of that sort of 60s and 70s-style guerrilla activism any more.

Well, definitely not. I guess there is, but it’s definitely not as apparent as it was when I was in university. People are shy about being organised now, that’s for sure. And I think that they’ve been cowed, you know, beaten down a fair bit. Activists, they don’t want to seem like Angelina Jolie or Bono or…

This weekend, first-time directors Brian Cassidy, Jennifer Loeber and (ex-Austinite) Aaron Hillis will bring their unusual but fantastic new documentary Fish Kill Flea to Austin for its world premiere at SXSW. Strange and funny and sad by turns, Fish Kill Flea is an honest, close-up portrait of a decaying mall in upstate New York that has become home to a popular (though shabby) flea market.

Though the subject seems fairly specific at first, the film eventually forces viewers to ask themselves some fairly weighty questions: Who is controlling our progress as a culture? Can good things be born out of failures? Will abandoning our history destroy our future?

We recently had a chance to ask the filmmakers about malls, filmmaking, and the importance of preserving our past.

Assuming you're all my age, we grew up near the peak of America's Mall obsession. We practically lived in those things—eating there, socializing there, and shopping there. Why have we begun to abandon malls as social centers, and what is taking their place, if anything?

AARON: The social aspects of shopping malls are dying out because the internet is swallowing all mall culture, period. Amazon.com gives you a department store in your living room, eBay is the ultimate garage sale, and these are just the household names. If people can buy goods faster, cheaper and easier online, are business owners going to keep their stores open just for teenagers to hook up on a Saturday night? I don't believe Second Life or MySpace is going to replace the need for concerts, coffee shops, museums, or anywhere else you'd ever meet someone, though it's also true I first met my wife through her blog. What technology has done that malls couldn't is centralize a global community instead of a regional one, but hopefully, people won't mistake these social tools as alternatives to live human interaction. I don't go for virtual hugs.

Throughout the film, you've interspersed shots of the mall both in its heyday and during its second life as a flea market. Is there a particular version of the mall you're more attached to? The shiny, happy, thriving mall, or the run-down but noble flea market?

BRIAN: I think the mall in its flea-market state is a more honest mall, not necessarily noble. It was as if the Dutchess Mall had finally become what she always intended to be. When you look at those old black-and-white photos, it's like somebody was pushing for this image of the mall as a vibrant social hub; I'm not sure that was ever true. The flea market was very bleak in some ways, but there was still a palpable sense that people were making the best of a situation and hoping to make a connection. I don't think anyone leaves the house in the morning because they need a Phyllis Diller backpack.

This Sunday, the SXSW Film Festival will host the world premiere of Jennifer Venditti's much buzzed-about documentary Billy The Kid. The film follows Billy Price, a fifteen-year-old boy who overcomes obstacles with courage and wisdom to spare.

This one looks really interesting—apparently, Venditti is a casting agent who's famous for her "street scouting", where she travels around finding real people (as opposed to, you know, actors) for advertising, fashion and film roles. She encountered Price while on a casting trip in Maine, and became so intrigued that she decided to make a documentary about him.

After the screening, head over to the after party at FactoryPeople, featuring a celebrity DJ (TBD) and imagery on the outside rooftop (running the trailer and additional footage from the documentary). The party is free and open to the public.

Billy the Kid Screening
Sunday, March 11th
Austin Convention Ctr
9pm
[Add Billy the Kid to Your Calendar on our (Unofficial) SXSW Film Other Side Guide]

After Party
Sunday, March 11th
FactoryPeople
11pm-2am, Free

Sure--we already told you about our amazing Other Side Guide to the South by Southwest Film Festival. But we're posting again to let you know how excited we are about this thing!

Not only can you effortlessly browse the huge list of amazing films playing at SXSW this year (by title, theatre, category or day), you can also rate movies, read and write reviews, keep a festival blog (maybe even a hilarious festival blog), get directions to the venues and plan out your entire schedule on a handy web-based calendar.

I know what you're thinking-- "That's all well and good, but what about the panels?" You're in luck, my friend, because now you can do all that stuff with the panels too! You can even search the schedule by the panelists you want to see.

And one of the great things about these nifty B-Side Entertainment sites is that your account works on any of them. So when the Austin Film Festival or Fantastic Fest or the Austin Gay and Lesbian International Film Festival rolls around later in the year, you'll already be set up.

Austin filmmaker Bob Ray's Hell on Wheels tells the story of Austin's roller derby revival, following a group of hard-hitting Texas women who pulled the sport from the brink of obscurity and into the international spotlight. Five years in the making, this rock-meets-rollerskates doc will be premiering at this years' South by Southwest film festival.

We recently had a chance to talk to Bob about Roller Derby, filmmaking and one-man bands.

How did Hell on Wheels get started?

Werner [Campbell, the film’s producer] and I had worked together in another capacity on some short films that I’d done, and we were trying to get a project together where he would produce. We were talking to this dude named Hasil Adkins, who was, like, the godfather of one-man bands; he lives out in Virginia out in some Podunk-ass holler out there, and he’s like a like a legend in the hillbilly, one-man band world—which is, granted, probably a very small world. But there are quite a few one-man bands here in town, so we were going to book a tour for him to Austin, where we would have a one-man band showcase with him as the headliner. So the project would be sort of a road doc thing, because he doesn’t fly or anything. The problem was, he is actually as crazy as his rep, and it ended up being more problematic than anything.

And so we were down at Emo’s—because this local band Honky that we like was playing—and we saw a bunch of girls on skates. And an old friend of mine, who was like the valedictorian at my high school, Crokett High in South Austin, she was there on skates. So I was like, “why are you on skates? What’s the deal?” And it turned out it was a benefit for the roller derby that was being organized. I’d heard about it before, but I just thought it was a bunch of hot air and lip service, as many, many, many things in this town are. But once I saw that my friend Jennifer was involved, I knew something was actually happening.

Earlier that day, the Hasil Adkins project was kind of falling apart, and so we thought, “let’s not do that, let’s do something else”. And then we thought, “hey-- this [roller derby] is happening right in the music scene that both Werner and I grew up in, involving a lot of the women from the music scene and the sort of 6th and Red River punk rock scene that was going on”. And so it just made sense.

We asked, “Is anybody filming this?” Nobody was, but they wanted someone to, and they’d seen or heard of Rock Opera, which was my first feature film, as well as some of the music videos that I’d done for bands like Nashville Pussy and Fuckemos… you know, kind of rock n’ roll punk rock bands. So I had some credibility, and they were really pleased to see someone who wasn’t just going to come in and spew hot air, hoping to pick up girls and get laid and maybe or maybe not make a movie. The realized that wasn’t the case with us, so we immediately started filming.

We hung around and filmed everything at first, and just kind of figured out where the story was, which is how it works with documentaries of this nature. Like with Spellbound, for example, or with Murderball, there’s a competition that becomes the third act, and then there’s an aftermath. But that wasn’t the case with us, and we though maybe it would be the case if—and this was a huge, huge if—if they ever even had a game. And if they managed to have a complete season, then maybe we could structure our film around that and have some sort of momentum build to a conclusion. Turns out it got way more insane than that, and that became completely secondary to what the real story was.

Aside from being an accomplished documentary filmmaker (and Guggenheim, Rockefeller, NEA and AFI Fellowship award recipient), Third Ward TX director Andrew Garrison is also an associate professor at the University of Texas, and the founder of East Austin Stories, an ongoing student documentary program that focuses on East Austin neighborhoods.

We recently had a chance to talk to Andrew about Third Ward, East Austin Stories and South by Southwest.

Tell us a little bit about the film and what it’s about.

Well, it’s about an inner-city neighborhood in Houston that had gone into decline since the 60s. It had been left for dead—abandoned, basically, by the city of Houston—and a group of seven African-American artists decided that they wanted to do some art that would draw attention to the issues there. But they got their awakening when they asked people, “what do you need?” and the people in the neighborhood said, “what we need is this placed cleaned up. We need the junkies out of here”. So the artists decided to take that on as their art.

One of the first things they did was to take two blocks of housing—shotgun houses that had been abandoned for thirty years, used as shooting galleries and for prostitution—they boarded them up and painted on the boards, over the windows and doors, and made a “drive by” exhibition. And then they actually bought those houses with an NEA grant, which is kind of remarkable. The bought twenty-two houses on two blocks, and they started to rehab them. They made eight houses into exhibition spaces for artists to show work for six months at a time. They had international art stars and locals—all kinds of different artists.

Another issue was that there were a lot of single mothers going to college who had no place to stay, so they dedicated another eight houses to single mothers. Six of them are residencies where single mothers can stay for up to two years rent-free, and the others are meeting houses and so on.

And as they kept doing art, it brought more people into the neighborhood and pushed the junkies away, and the neighborhood once again became a safe and lively place to be. They started an after-school program for kids; they had a summer program and a cultural center. But all of that, while making it a better place, brought the attention of developers. And so now they’ve got this great neighborhood, but the market force of gentrification might just scatter everyone. And so their new challenge is, “what do we do about that?”

One of the films we're most excited about seeing at this year's South By Southwest Film Festival is Laura Dunn's The Unforeseen, a documentary look at the controversy surrounding Austin's real estate development and its impact on the Edwards Aquifer and on Barton Springs. Co-executive-produced by Terrence Malik and Robert Redford (who reportedly learned to swim at Barton Springs), the film explores the unseen relationships between our natural environment and our urge to destroy it.

A graduate of UT Film School, director Laura Dunn is an award-winning filmmaker, as well as the Founder and Executive Director of the Austin-based production company Two Birds Film. We recently had a chance to talk to Laura about the creative process, the documentary backlash and the American Dream.

Tell us a little bit about the film and what it’s about.

Basically, the film looks at the growth wars in Austin—the battle over Barton Springs and the land and the environment. The battle between developers and environmentalists that’s been going on in Austin since the early 70s. So it’s really sort of a 30-year trajectory. What I’m trying to do is use the battle in Austin as a microcosm for what communities all over the country are dealing with. As we “grow” (and that word is debatable in terms of what it means in my opinion), we threaten the very natural resources that brought us here to begin with.

Barton Springs is a symbol in our community of the natural environment and of our precious natural resources. It’s also been a real icon of the community, and a catalyst for a lot of the debate in the growth wars. So though I’ve focused on Barton Springs for the film, it addresses a lot more than just Barton Springs.

There are a handful of key characters I selected, one of which may be a little controversial—Gary Bradley, who has been one of the more notorious developers over the [Edwards] Aquifer, and is sort of the arch nemesis of the environmental movement. I really wanted to try to see it all through his eyes, and so he’s a key character in the film, as is Barton Springs and several people who speak for Barton Springs. In a nutshell, that’s what the film is about.

You’re a local, so obviously this topic is important to you. Was the impetus for making this movie because you wanted to tell this particular story, or was it that you’re a filmmaker, and you need to make films?

It’s an interesting question—the impetus for the film actually came from Terrence Malick, who approached me about the project. He put the idea on the table for me to do, and he’d executive produce and sort of mentor me though the process. So in this case, the reason I did it was to work for Terrence.

I personally am driven equally by the need to make art just as a matter of self-expression, and to try to kind of find a language to communicate with. As well as that I’m very concerned about the state of the environment, and I find a lot of peace in the natural world, and that it’s disappearing before our eyes is of great concern to me personally. So I wouldn’t really say that it’s one more than the other—it’s both for me.

Since moving to Austin in the early 90s to attend film school at UT, Bryan Poyser has become a fixture in the local film scene. A co-founder of the Cinematexas Film Festival, Bryan has also spent time as a producer at SXSW Film, and is currently Director of Artist Services for the Austin Film Society.

And on top of all that, he makes movies. With two shorts and two features under his belt (one of which earned him an Independent Spirit Award nomination in 2004), Bryan is set to premiere his newest short, Grammy's, at this year's South By Southwest Film Festival.

We recently had a chance to talk to Bryan about his new film, South By Southwest, and the rise of Rusty Kelley.

Tell me a little bit about what Grammy’s is about, and how the project got started.

Basically, I’ve been friends with Joe Swanberg for a long time—he’s a Chicago filmmaker who’s already made like four features, and he’s only 26. Joe sent me his first movie, which he’s in, and as I was watching it I was thinking that I really wanted to try to cast him in something with Rusty Kelley, who’s the star of Dear Pillow, the first feature that I did. I wanted to cast them as brothers because I thought they had these really great, similar sort of mannerisms and they sort of looked the same. So I was obsessed with the idea of putting them together in some sort of story for about a year, and I finally came up with the idea of them going on a fishing trip and meeting this strange sort of guy, played by another Austin actor that I really like, Chris Doubek.

So we ended up doing a fundraiser to raise money for the film. I talked to the folks at the Alamo, and they let us do a double feature of Dear Pillow and Joe’s first movie, Kissing on the Mouth. We also did a raffle—I’ve been part of the Austin film community for a while, so I was able to call in favors from places like SXSW and the Austin Film Festival and the Austin Gay & Lesbian Film Festival to give away badges or memberships.

We did that on June 15th, and we started shooting on June 16th, so it gave the whole shooting process a sort of frantic air. We were trying to do it really fast and be excited about the process rather than obsessing over the details.

How different is it showing a short film as opposed to a feature?

Well, short films are always going to be the sort of “neglected step-cousin” to the features. And I didn’t really know that until I’d gone through the process of showing one; a short film that I did called Pleasureland played at about 25 film festivals both here and in Europe. I had a great time showing the film and having people react to it and meeting other filmmakers, but I didn’t get much press or industry attention out of it.

That kind of changed when Dear Pillow started the festival circuit though. Even though we still haven’t gotten distribution for the movie, it got nominated for an Independent Spirit Award and won some festival awards and got some great reviews and basically set things up so that we could do The Cassidy Kids, which was a feature with a real budget. And noticing that difference was pretty interesting and pretty stark.

But now that I’ve made a short film and I’m about to show it at SXSW, I’m totally okay with the idea of not getting much press. And if people end up liking it and connecting to it then that’s great.

Now in his fourth year as producer for the South By Southwest Film Festival, Matt Dentler might just be the busiest guy in the Austin film community. In addition to his year-round duties at SXSW Film, he's also a programmer for the mega-awesome Fantastic Fest, a curator for two national film distributors, an active blogger, television show host and occasional film festival panelist, judge and lecturer. And as if that weren't enough to keep him busy, he also sits on the Board of Directors at the Austin Film Society (and as far as we can tell is the youngest current Board Member).

We recently had a chance to chat with Dentler about film programming, Austin audiences, and the upcoming South By Southwest Film Festival.

You spend a lot of the year traveling to other film festivals looking for films to show at South By Southwest, right?

Yeah, I definitely do. Programming, looking for things, figuring out what works for us and what we can bring to the festival.

Being a guy who has a lot of experience attending film festivals, what makes South By Southwest different?

I think the audiences. By and large, Austin has some of the best audiences in the world, and I think that a lot of the filmmakers and the industry people who come into town for the festival are really excited by our audiences—there’s a tangible feeling in the air with the screenings here that you may not get at a lot of the other festivals. Austin is a film lover’s town, and it’s really exciting to be able to host an event that caters to that.

How has the festival changed since you came on as Producer?

It’s definitely gotten bigger. There are more films now than there were before, and I think the scope of the attendees has grown. We’re getting a lot more audience and industry from all corners of the globe. And I’d say that as a result, the quality of the films has really grown over the years. We have a really great staff of programmers and a really great team of people working year-round. The chemistry of the staff has been very successful in achieving a bigger and hopefully better event.

Obviously your job entails a lot of movie watching. Do you ever get burned out on watching films?

Well, not really. Obviously it’s a very busy job, but the great thing about working in a business like this is that every year there are new films and filmmakers to discover, and that keeps things vital and fresh year after year. It’s certainly not a job that finds you getting complacent or sluggish or in any sort of groove. And for whatever reason, I’m of the mindset that I’m always thirsty and willing for more films to watch.

In our effort to help you sort through all of the excellent screenings at SXSW Film Festival, we've partnered up with Austin-based B-Side Entertainment, who create nifty online program guides for film festivals all around the world. Locally, they're responsible for the interactive schedules you might have encountered at Austin Film Festival, the Austin Gay and Lesbian International Film Festival, and Fantastic Fest.

Here are just some of the things you do over at the "(Unofficial) SXSW Other Side Guide":

• Browse through all 236 films to be screened, either by categories (Documentary Features, Narrative Shorts, Music Videos, Late Night Screenings and the like), day. or venue.
• Create your own customized calendar of screenings that you'd like to attend
• Rate and review films during the festival, for your chance to win a 2008 SXSW Silver Film Badge
• Read film synopses, learn about cast and crew, access official film websites, and view trailers

As we ramp up for more SXSW film coverage next week, we'll be linking back to the relevant pages on the Other Side Guide. For now, we invite you to check it out for yourself below:

[B-Side and Austinist Present the (Unofficial) SXSW Film Other Side Guide]

Screen capture from synopsis page of I'm A Cyborg, But That's OK: "A girl who thinks she is a combat cyborg checks into a mental hospital, where she encounters other psychotics. Eventually, she falls for a man who thinks he can steal people's souls."