SXSW Is Back

By David Hudson

The Daily—

Mar 10, 2022

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Stephanie Hsu, Michelle Yeoh, and Ke Huy Quan in Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

The taco trucks are rolling in, there’s a band setting up in every bar, and the movie theaters have opened their doors. For the first time since 2019, the SXSW Film Festival is back in Austin as an in-person event. Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, who gave us Paul Dano steering Daniel Radcliffe’s farting corpse over rollicking waves in Swiss Army Man (2016), will open SXSW 2022 with Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Michelle Yeoh stars as Evelyn, a simple woman just trying to get her taxes done when she’s called on to save the multiverse. The Daniels are “back with something so wild, ambitious, and hilariously unmoored that it makes their magnificent debut seem like an episode of Young Sheldon by comparison,” writes David Ehrlich in IndieWire’s SXSW preview package. Everything Everywhere All at Once “makes very, very, very, very good on its title on its way towards reconciling the smallness of our lives with the infinity of their potential.”

IndieWire’s Kate Erbland recommends Beth de Araújo’s Soft & Quiet, in which a quartet of alt-right Karens sets out to harass two mixed-raced Asian sisters. “Easily the most terrifying outing of the year so far,” Soft & Quiet plays out in a single ninety-minute take. Ti West’s X takes us to 1979 and to an isolated house in rural Texas, where a group of friends plans to shoot a porn flick. Their elderly hosts do not seem to approve. “You may think you know where this is going,” writes Erbland, “but trust us, you really, really don’t.”

Hammer to Nail, the Playlist, and Women and Hollywood also have preview bundles, but the deepest dive into this year’s edition naturally comes from the Austin Chronicle. The special SXSW section in this week’s issue features Richard Whittaker’s conversation with Glenn Powell, who plays one of the heads of NASA’s space program in Richard Linklater’s Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood. The animated feature is narrated by Stanley (Jack Black), who looks back to the magical spring and summer of 1969, when he was just a sharp kid (Milo Coy) growing up in a Houston suburb and, like everybody else, was eagerly anticipating humankind’s first walk on the moon. Linklater’s “energy really brings out the best in people,” says Powell, adding: “He’s done a really Houston movie.”

Along with ninety-nine features, 111 shorts, two dozen music videos, and nearly thirty XR Experience projects, SXSW will present eighteen samples from episodic narratives, including the season 3 premiere of the FX series Atlanta, which will close out this year’s edition on March 19. Directed by Hiro Murai and starring series creator Donald Glover along with Brian Tyree Henry, LaKeith Stanfield, and Zazie Beetz, the long-awaited return of Atlanta finds Earn, Paper Boi, Darius, and Van touring Europe and coping with fame and success.

“For filmmakers to be able to experience their work with an audience—even if there’s more audience to be had in streaming and television—there’s nothing like being able to experience it in-person, to feel the room,” SXSW director of film Janet Pierson tells the Los Angeles Times’ Mark Olsen. Director of programming Claudette Godfrey emphasizes that festivals offer filmmakers opportunities to build a “bigger community. That is why we are still doing our jobs, because, of course, everything is hard, but that payoff this year, when we get to see some of those people and be together, it’s going to be amazing.”

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