The SXSW Film Festival went virtual for 2020 and all the shorts are, as of this writing, still available to stream from a Mail Chimp webpage. The four on this page were nominated for the SXSW Grand Jury Award and the last one won it. I didn't do a lot of research before randomly picking the first three out of over fifty available.
Basic (2020) is hilarious and only four minutes long. Director/writer/star Chelsea Devantez (her credits include executive story editor for the sitcom Bless The Mess) scrolls through Instagram trash-talking someone. On the official SXSW platform (now closed), there was a very funny intro by Devantez, in which she explains that she's wearing a ball cap because she cut her own bangs and strongly urges everyone not to do that. Amy and Jack saw this short and the intro with me and liked it a lot, too. I watched the others by myself. Side note: I looked for the intro video but found this tweet instead. Also funny!
Summer Hit (2019) is twenty minutes long, about some attractive foreign students in Berlin, focusing on a woman from Spain and man from Iceland coupling and uncoupling. It's pleasant enough. Directed and written by Berthold Wahjudi, who is German, it has subtitles.
Vert (2019) is a twelve minute drama about a happily married British couple in the future celebrating their anniversary with some virtual reality. Nick Frost (last blogged for The World's End) plays the husband for director/writer Kate Cox. I enjoyed it.
Symbiosis (2019), the winner, is thirteen minutes long and not very enjoyable. Hungarian director/co-writer Nádja Andrasev give us a wordless animated story of a woman tracking her husband's philandering. There's plenty of sex. When we watched the SXSW movies on May 6, I looked in vain for this one, and just watched it today. Meh.
Watch Basic and Vert for sure and then you can pick and choose from the long list on Mail Chimp.
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