SXSW 2024 Preview: 8 Movies You Shouldn’t Miss

Birdeater

Jack Clark and Jim Weir’s nauseating debut is a stag party thriller that gets its rocks off by slipping its camera a mickey and leaving us to twirl amid its poisonous characters. Filled with horrible men and the women who date them, Birdeater‘s rollicking score (composer Andreas Dominguez comes out swinging), fire-lit cinematography (from DP Roger Stonehouse) and swirling, intoxicated camerawork strand you at a terrible blowout attended by characters with the kinds of personal vendettas against one another that develop over yearslong social relationships. A little Trainspotting here, a bit of Australian New Wave there, a dash of Promising Young Woman — Birdeater is a totally toxic rager rife with psychosexual mind games. It helps that the small cast making up the party snipes and swears at each other perfectly, with the deeply off-putting performance by Ben Hunter being the upsetting breakout turn. His deadbeat wild-man is a classic bit of unpredictable Aussie masculinity, used to great effect by films stranding vulnerable people in the outback. Here, he’s just the most visible threat to the celebration of couple Louie (Mackenzie Fearnley) and Irene (Shabana Azeez). Their love is complexly pretzeled, mostly understood by the friend group and silently displayed to us. While we discover more about everyone’s dark secrets over this debauched night, the sticky, out-of-control atmosphere Clark and Weir coax from their celebrants makes Birdeater a midnight winner all on its own.

Clemente

A quick-moving and straightforward doc from David Altrogge, Clemente puts baseball legend Roberto Clemente on the pedestal he deserves while making the case for his placement there. The athletic excellence of right-fielder Clemente is plain to see in the archival footage and his stat lines, but his legend is verified (like most legendary sports players, rock stars and pop idols) by his chorus of fans. Baseball die-hard Richard Linklater drops by to wax poetic about Clemente, while Michael Keaton remembers the influence Clemente had on his childhood Pittsburgh Pirates fandom. His ex-teammates and a slew of Latino players that followed in his wake remember him as a trailblazer who broke their own cultural barrier in the sport: Described as a Latino Jackie Robinson, Clemente’s dedication to his Puerto Rican heritage and his native Spanish language made him a high-profile hero for a huge swath of baseball fans — and the first in a series of Latin American MLB sensations. On the less high-profile side are those who remember Clemente’s down-to-earth, charitable side. His love of his family, his willingness to befriend random fans, his investment in charity work that was so deep, he died young doing it — these are explored with softness and a personal touch by the interview subjects. His frustrations, quirks and failures aren’t brushed aside, but only ground his near-mythical combination of moral superiority and physical dominance. Clemente is a baseball fan’s documentary, but it’s accessible enough for anyone to get invested in — and it’s so convincing about its subject’s importance, that even the biggest skeptic of America’s pastime will walk away ready to remember some ballplayers with some old-timers at the local watering hole.

Dìdi

A gutshot coming-of-age story aimed directly at those former-teenagers who weathered the great transition from MySpace to Facebook, writer/director Sean Wang’s Dìdi is—like so much backwards-looking media about youth—almost more painful than poignant. It’s not upsetting, nor is it overly invested in tricking tears out of us. It’s just so specifically observed that you’ll be hiding your head in your hands, ashamed that you were ever as foolish, cowardly, insolent, horny and ridiculous as Chris Wang (Izaac Wang). Contained within the lifespan of Wang’s braces, Dìdi‘s summer dramedy tracks the transition between middle and high school for his pack of SoCal pals. Wang’s home life—as a Taiwanese American who lives with his mom (Joan Chen, wistful and playful as always), sister and grandmother—drapes another layer of specificity onto the lived-in script from Sean Wang (who was nominated for an Oscar this past year for Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó, a doc about his own grandmothers). Most of the movie is spent in Wang’s own blended social world of screens and skaters, but these brief interludes attempt to establish a deeper emotional core for a movie that already builds one through period-appropriate signifiers: The aloof AIM conversations about everything and nothing; the social politics of blocking a half-dated crush; the show-offy recitation of stand-up bits in front of girls, pretending like you came up with the anecdotes and punchlines. These are all embarrassing, moving, nostalgic and hilarious. It’s like putting your tween diary on the big screen, passages broken up by slides of your oldest social media posts. Sean Wang tears through this unflinching time capsule with an energetic cuteness that still has a hateful underbelly, ready to be exposed by its pubescent boys at the first sign of danger. It’s a companion piece of cringe-anthropology to accompany Eighth Grade, the familiar plot beats drawing their power from the exact year-month-day its setting exudes from every Paramore t-shirt and Motion City Soundtrack needledrop. Dìdi doesn’t break a lot of ground, but the warm return to the late ’00s will be an uncanny flashback for the right audience.

Ghostlight

Ghostlight opens with darkness smothering the rustle and whispers of an audience making its way to their seats before the show starts. Then: The rattling hiss of the stage curtain opening. We expect to see actors, a set, props. Instead, we just see a suburban backyard, the property of Dan (Keith Kupferer), who’s awake much too early for his or his wife’s liking, but helpless to do anything about his REM cycles apart from stare forlornly outside. Life, the film tells us up front, is a show we all perform in, but in the rest of the telling, Ghostlight argues that acting specifically, and the arts broadly, are necessary tools for understanding it. Like Saint Frances, Ghostlight was written by Kelly O’Sullivan, who played the lead in the former and went behind the camera with Alex Thompson to co-direct on this one. Dan is haunted by a year-old tragedy that goes unspecified for the film’s first hour; the choice to dole out pieces of that lingering incident, which weighs on Dan as surely as his wife Sharon (Tara Mallen) and their daughter Daisy (Katherine Mallen Kupferer), gives the filmmakers scaffolding that mimics the way Dan dances around his grief rather than face it. It’s a heartbreaking bread crumb trail leading us bit by bit to the worst possible ordeal a family can endure, an injury inflamed by an insult to Dan’s self-esteem: Mandatory leave from his construction job following a volcanic physical outburst on site. Happily, misery loves company, and though Rita (Dolly de Leon), an erstwhile Broadway actress now doing community theater, isn’t miserable herself, exactly, she can pick a miserable soul out of a crowd like a hawk tracking mice through grass. She invites Dan to join her troupe; they’re putting on a production of Romeo and Juliet, and they’re down a man. Ghostlight could easily cultivate these characters as guides to one another, a group of lost souls who find redemptive catharsis through their friendships; this is, after all and in fairness, the role Rita plays to the reluctant, chagrined Dan. But the film’s thesis is about not human connection but humans’ connection to art, how we benefit from the presence of art in our lives, and what lonely, repressed existences we’d be damned to lead without it. Ghostlight’s argument in favor of art as essential to the soul is also a statement honoring creative endeavors as noble professions. — Andy Crump

Girls Will Be Girls

A tangible takedown of patriarchal hypocrisy, and how these larger social forces impact women in specific ways, Girls Will Be Girls is a bold and thoughtfully shot debut from writer/director Shuchi Talati. Complicating the story of Mira (Preeti Panigrahi) and Sri’s (Kesav Binoy Kiron) boarding-school romance with erotic thriller psychology and cultural observation, Girls Will Be Girls documents coming-of-age moments with refreshing spirit and explicitness. Adding in the complex role of Mira’s wannabe cool-mom Anila (Kani Kusruti) can make the movie seem like it’s juggling quite a bit, but within Talati’s confident, cramped, physically intimate frames, the latent energy is enough to carry us forward through the movie’s sometimes-warring interests. With beautiful colors, lived-in performances and a searing perspective on Indian society, Girls Will Be Girls is a heightened, beautiful, painful return to high school—with enough uncomfortable twists to make you squirm in your seat.

Never Look Away

While we’re currently inundated with troubling, heartbreaking photos and videos from around the world thanks to social media, it wasn’t so long ago that the only way the outside world got a sense of the sheer scope and human cost of geopolitical atrocities was by journalists traveling in, and getting their footage out. The Vietnam War moved our cultural images of war away from the powerful still images of WWII and towards the painful reality of action. You can know there’s violence when you see it, but you can feel the violence when there’s movement. Camerawoman Margaret Moth was one of those braving war zones to inform the world, this time filling the groundbreaking 24-hour needs of the newly founded CNN with the conflicts of the ‘90s. Directed by Lucy Lawless in her debut, Never Look Away documents the life and career of the spitfire with the same relentless energy as its adrenaline-junkie subject—and gives us a sense of what kind of person was putting themselves in danger to bring us the news. Never Look Away alternates between interview subjects and harrowing footage describing the life of a cameraperson covering war, and interview subjects and harrowing footage describing Moth. The two blur together before we have much sense of the latter, caught up in the blustery bravado of a combat zone montage set to Heart’s “Barracuda.” It’s here that Lawless, documenting the life of fellow Kiwi Moth, gives in most to the least generous reading of her subject: The rocker adrenaline junkie who got a headbanging rush from tanks rolling in, explosions detonating and civilians grieving. That’s a kind of person we all know, and the familiarity these descriptors hold can give way to some simple, indulgent metaphors. Lawless’ most promising skill is in her wrangling of all the archival material on the other side of this. She and editors Whetham Allpress and Tim Woodhouse craft kinetic, high-intensity rundowns of ‘80s and ‘90s world events. Tiananmen Square runs headlong into Desert Storm, which collides into the Bosnian War and Israeli airstrikes. When we finally come up for air, listening to one of the talking heads emphasize how overwhelming (and addicting) war can be, we’re just grateful to get a second to ourselves. Never Look Away’s final message, not about Moth, but about the necessity of journalistic images is, like Moth, a time capsule of a past we’ll never return to. Moth’s footage, uniquely visceral, once shaped the opinions and emotions of nations. Now, as we have become so numbed by the on-the-ground images shot by amateurs and distributed over social media, the idea that a single piece of footage could enact change feels like an idealistic pipe dream. Never Look Away is a testament to a time when justice was just an act of bravery and a rolling camera away.

Secret Mall Apartment

The coolest documentary premise of this year’s SXSW spells it all out in the title: Secret Mall Apartment. What’s not to get? Longtime documentarian Jeremy Workman doesn’t miss the easy lay-up handed to him by a Rhode Island artist collective, who filmed themselves finding a hidden enclave of space deep in the belly of the gargantuan Providence Place Mall…and then building a secret apartment there that they used from 2003 to 2007. By using the tiny handheld cameras of the early ’00s to document their ridiculous piece of real estate rebellion, these eight slackers (led by art-professor-turned-tape-artist Michael Townsend) provide us with impossibly compelling DIY footage of everything from sneaking in bags of concrete to sitting in the middle of a mall, playing the PS2. Their discreet pushback against gentrification has the tension and fun of a crime caper, with Workman’s interviews building out the philosophy of the collective and the urban context in which they worked. Though Secret Mall Apartment can sometimes deify Townsend as a principled subversive, the bounty of contemporary footage it incorporates to show us the dedication and fuck-you spirit driving this project is too fun to deny and too ridiculous to take too seriously. An inspirational oddity, perfect for an Austin crowd.

Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.

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