This past week, I hopped on a plane to make a 10-hour journey to Austin, Texas where I attended my first ever SXSW Conference and Festivals event. A filmmaker myself, SXSW has long been on my list of “things to do before I die” so when the opportunity arose to cover the film festival as official press for Film Inquiry (alongside Manon de Reeper, Shawn Glinis, and Hazem Fahmy).
For several weeks before the festival began, my inbox became inundated with press emails from PR reps, all of them enticing any and every journalist to see their film before the others. I arranged what I thought was a decent approximate screening schedule, set up some interviews, and got off the plane feeling good. Little did I realize that just about all of that planning was going to go out the window.
Navigating the Festival
SXSW began in 1987 and since then they have developed a rather devoted following. I knew it was going to be busy, but downtown Austin during SXSW (or “South By” as everyone seems to call it) is an absolute zoo. The staggering amount of people moving every direction, queuing for every event, packing into every venue is absolutely dizzying, even arriving late on an evening as I did. Luckily, as press, I was a badge holder and this got me around the Austin Convention Center with ease, as well as into the registrants’ lounge (free drinks, what) and so I set up my home base in the center around 4th Street and Trinity Street.
From this point, many of the main film venues are within walking distance – the Stateside and Paramount theatres are on Congress Ave past 7th, the Alamo Ritz is right there on 6th Street, and the JW Marriott is just over at 3rd and Congress. What I realized very quickly was that the festival spreads across Austin more than I originally thought and a couple of the screening venues, in particular, the Zach and the Alamo Lamar, were not convenient to my home base. However, the festival provides free shuttles across the city to help attendees get to screenings. This requires a bit of planning, especially during rush hour, as you have to arrive at screenings fairly early to ensure seating, something I learned very quickly.
The downsides are that many of the events tend to be scheduled concurrently so you need to pick and choose. The festival definitely endeavors to schedule things like film screenings multiple times, so if its a choice between a panel or a keynote and a film screening, I recommend always picking the panel and/or keynote and trying to see the film at a later showing if possible. Another issue is that you might think you’ve got plenty of time to get from the Alamo Lamar where your screening lets out at 3:15 to the Stateside for a 4 pm screening but between the 20 minute shuttle ride (assuming its running promptly and that it’s not full) and the lines, you needed to be at your 4 pm screening by at least 3, if not earlier.
Given all of that, during the first two days of the festival, I accomplished very little, spending a lot of time in lines or running from venue to venue. The word I kept using was “overwhelming”. An overwhelming amount of people, an overwhelming amount of events, overwhelming in general. Luckily, a chance meeting on a bus was going to change all that…
The Austin “Guru”
As we staggered onto a bus headed toward our AirBnB, utterly exhausted from the days of running around and waiting in lines, we were joined by a diminutive but fiery woman in a baseball cap. She exuded a friendliness that I now consider to be typical of Austin residents, and we all struck up a conversation as we were shuttled along.
She told us about her adventures as a self-proclaimed hippie, bringing her from Connecticut to Austin many years ago. Much to our amazement and excitement, she mentioned that she went to school with Kevin Conroy, the voice of Batman. The four of us were simply enjoying a pleasant conversation. After almost twenty minutes of animated discussion, she casually mentioned that she was working as a volunteer for the festival and had done so for several years. I seized the opportunity and mentioned the exhaustion from the long waits and the difficulty I was having figuring out how to use the SXXpress Passes, hoping for any advice on how to get an edge.
The SXXpress Passes are an excellent option for badge holders and essentially function as a reservation (though it’s important to note here that you are not guaranteed a seat). Advantages include: jumping to the head of the queue (so if you are there half an hour ahead of time, it is pretty much a guarantee) and first choice of seating, which is my favorite aspect. However, the festival only distributes a limited number of passes 24 hours before each screening. The solution seems obvious now, but this lovely lady (whose name we never got) said immediately, “Oh you have to set an alarm or you’ll miss them,” and she got off the bus and wandering off into the night.
Feeling a little sheepish but grateful (it is the obvious solution), I began setting alarms and suddenly my two-hour waits were whittled down to 30 minutes. I was able to fill up much more of my day with activities (there was so much room…). This meant I was able to get around to more of the venues as well. And now that I had a feel for the distances between the venues, I went through and reorganized my schedule based on what was screening where.
There are lots of screenings, and the schedule isn’t always the easiest thing to sift through, but given a little time and effort I managed to completely fill up my next few days rather than having to save a spot hours in advance in a line. I started to feel less overwhelmed and enjoy the festival, the city, and its venues more.
The Theatres
The screening venues at SXSW range from brand new to vintage and each of them has its own charm about it. For instance, the Alamo Drafthouse Ritz still has a functioning light-up marquee that required me to put on my sunglasses and the Stateside and Paramount still use their less flashy but equally retro cinema signs.
Finding myself first at the Alamo Drafthouse on Lamar, my first visit to the famous (or infamous) chain, I was curious, to say the least. Unlike other dinner-theatre style cinemas I’ve visited before, the Alamo theatres in Austin (both Lamar and Ritz) aren’t trying to be modern and sleek, despite the Alamo Lamar’s new construction. Quite the opposite.
Inside, red velvet curtains adorn the walls, and in the Ritz the lights were made out of old reels. The seats in both theatres are classic cinema style but with raisable armrests should you want to cozy up to your seat buddy and a long wooden plank runs along in front of them, serving as a bar. By far my favorite thing about these theatres is that instead of running ads or previews, they will play retro and often bizarre or forgotten (for good reason, usually) videos ahead of the screenings, like this.
I made a point to try a selection of the food, which ranges from classic cinema snacks to gourmet burgers and flatbread pizzas. If you’re a fan of the dish, you can’t go wrong with their mac and cheese. For my beverage, I kept ordering their Bloody Mary c*cktail, which at one point was referred to as a “Bloody Wasabi” by the waitstaff. Just the right amount of spicy for me (but more on spicy Austin later). Ever the progressive city, the menu offers several vegetarian and gluten-free options and many of them even looked good.
There’s less to describe about the Stateside and Paramount theatres because they are both your standard traditional cinemas, but that is what gives them their charm. These warhorses of cinema have been here long before SXSW was even a thought. The Paramount was opened in 1915 as a vaudeville theatre and converted to a cinema in the 1920s, while the Stateside opened in 1935 (as The State Theatre). How exciting is it to sit in the theatre that saw the world premieres of Batman (1966) or The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982)? Very. That’s how.
Austin Itself: Food and People
So you’ve watched some movies, scoped out the Convention Center, maybe even taken in a few gigs, and now…well you’re probably hungry. You have come to the right city. Countless articles have already been written about the excellent food scene in Austin, but what about finding something good (and cheap) conveniently located by the festival? There’s plenty of restaurants and food trucks, but especially on the main drag be prepared to shell out $10-15 just for tacos or quesadillas. The closer you are to the convention center, the more you’re going to pay at the food truck I found, but if you’re willing to walk even just a few blocks you can find excellent street food for about half the price.
However, there are two standing venues that I want to go out of my way to mention. The first is The Onion, proudly claiming to be “the best pizza you’ll never remember eating”, located on Brazos Ave. They don’t close until 3 am and they make a pizza that this east coaster approves of, which is no mean feat. The secret definitely seems to be in their sauce, which has a real kick to it, like much of the food in Austin. Couple delicious pizza with super friendly serving staff and you’ve got one great spot that’s just far enough away not to be quite as packed as the other venues, but close enough that you don’t feel like you’ve made a trek.
The second place is The Hideout Coffee House, which is attached to the Hideout Theatre on Congress Ave just a block south of the Stateside and Paramount theatres. The beauty of this spot is that it’s almost like the Leaky Cauldron – if you didn’t know it was there, you might easily walk past. This meant that even in the middle of the day, I was able to get quick, friendly service (and tacos!) as well as a spot to sit and charge my phone (they have a plethora of plugs). My latte was yummy and lacked the pretension of some of the local chains.
What both of these places have in common is what Austin as a city has in common – the people are just so damn nice. I remember watching an interview with Sir Ian McKellen where he says that’s a horrible way to describe someone but sometimes it just is the perfect word, and that’s how I feel about the people of Austin. “Nice” doesn’t seem good enough.
They are genuine, friendly, kind – or, in a word, nice. Whether it’s as simple as smiling to you when you walk through the door or as kind as letting you pay for your soda with “a good deed”, Austin seems to have a sense of chill and camaraderie that I’ve really found welcoming. It might be my Lyft driver who tells me about his plans to build a school in Nigeria or the woman on the bus who became my Austin “guru”. Maybe it’s the guy riding around on his motorbike blasting “Man of Constant Sorrow” and singing it with any random pedestrian who will join in (me).
The people of Austin simply exude friendliness and joy. I know that I will miss all of them when I leave at the end of this year’s SXSW festival. If this is what makes Austin “weird’, then we could all stand to be a little weirder.
Does content like this matter to you?
Become a Member and support film journalism. Unlock access to all of Film Inquiry`s great articles. Join a community of like-minded readers who are passionate about cinema - get access to our private members Network, give back to independent filmmakers, and more.