North Texas Filmmakers at SXSW

We’ve been busy giving you the info on local bands playing at South by Southwest, but some North Texas films will be playing the Austin festival, too. Of the two feature films from this area, the more interesting one is surely Clay Liford’s Wuss, mentioned in our recent cover story about Arianne Martin, about an English teacher who plots revenge after his students beat him. The other feature is Turk Pipkin’s documentary Building Hope, filmed partially at SMU but set mostly in Kenya about the Nobelity Project’s building of an area’s first high school.

Most of the other North Texas films are shorts. Foremost among these is Pioneer, about a father telling his son an epic bedtime story. It’s by David Patrick Lowery, who has played SXSW before and been profiled in our pages. The others are mostly Dallas-filmed and confined to the Texas Shorts or Texas High School Shorts programs at the festival. These include Ryan Kline’s The Doorman, Geoff McGee’s Neal (with its story about an automatic pool cleaner that has become sentient), and Tiffany Giraudon and Kalen Doyle’s Sparky, filmed in Addison. The only Fort Worth entry is high school student Chad Werner’s intriguingly titled silent film (___), which is pictured below. It’s about a girl who accidentally breaks her cell phone and discovers that she is invisible to her classmates without it. By the way, I e-mailed Chad Werner and asked how to pronounce the title. He said he calls it “uhhhh,” but that you can call it “untitled” or “cell phone movie.” Best of luck to him and all the other local filmmakers at SXSW.