The South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival is honored to announce the full lineup of features scheduled to be a part of the 2006 event in Austin, Texas, March 10-18. Among the highlights are Paul Weitz’s American Dreamz, starring Hugh Grant, Dennis Quaid and Mandy Moore, concluding the festival, on March 18.

The festival will open on March 10, with the North American Premiere of A Prairie Home Companion, directed by Robert Altman. The festival’s “Spotlight Premieres” section will include features about celebrities like Al Franken (Al Franken in God Spoke), Ray Romano (95 Miles To Go), Charles Nelson Reilly (The Life of Reilly), Bettie Page (The Notorious Bettie Page), Ed “Big Daddy” Roth (Tales of the Rat Fink), Jackson Pollock (Who The $#%& is Jackson Pollock), and Nobel prize winners (Nobelity). The festival’s programming committee received a record number of approximately 2800 submissions, and will screen 115 features during the festival. The program includes over 50 world premiere features from around the globe. An announcement of the shorts lineup will follow on February 13.

“We considered many more films this year, and I think the program stands among our best,” says Matt Dentler, Festival Producer for SXSW. “Our job was harder than ever before, but it also means we saw a better array of films than ever before.”

Other “Spotlight Premieres” include Even Money starring Kim Basinger and Ray Liotta, Heavens Fall starring Timothy Hutton and David Strathairn, The King starring Gael Garcia Bernal and William Hurt, The Oh in Ohio starring Parker Posey and Paul Rudd, and many more.

“Despite the large amount of star-driven films at the festival,” continues Dentler, “there is still an amazing variety of new voices in our programs. There will be a wealth of talented discovery at SXSW this year.”

In the Documentary Feature Competition, there is a thread of films about the world economy, from credit card debt (Maxed Out) to the oil crisis (OilCrash) to private security contractors overseas (Shadow Company). Meanwhile, the Narrative Feature Competition boasts an assortment of titles from new voices, including Dance Party, USA, The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael, Inner Circle Line, and LOL. A list of the complete feature lineup (which will include a Kris Kristofferson retrospective) follows, and is also available on the festival’s Web site: www.sxsw.com/film.