OWA's 2nd Annual Star Wars Day Celebration and SciFi at SXSW

MAY THE FOURTH is Strong With OWA:

Announcing 2nd Annual Star Wars Day Celebration

AUSTIN, TX -- Other Worlds Austin SciFi Film Festival will celebrate Star Wars Day (May the Fourth) with a program of stellar Star Wars fan films, a SciFi Dance Party (hosted by DJ Boba Fett), a costume contest, a special burlesque performance by OWA’s own Gemmi Galactic, as well as Star Wars memorabilia from Austin Books & Comics. The free event will take place at the North Door (502 Brushy St, Austin, TX 78702). Doors will open at 6:00pm and the program will begin at 7:30pm.

Fan films will include:

DARTH MAUL: APPRENTICE

With his training almost complete, Darth Maul must face six Jedi in order to reach his true potential, and become a Dark Lord of the Sith. Directed by Shawn Bu.

THE LESSER EVIL

2015 “Filmmaker Select” Star Wars Fan Film Award winner as chosen by Lucasfilm president, Kathleen Kennedy. A Jedi Master and his Padawan, with the help of a bounty hunter, go after a Sith Lord. Directed by Sy Cody White.

GEORGE LUCAS IN LOVE

1967 film student George Lucas has writer's block trying to finish his "Space Wheat" script, until a beautiful fellow student with a familiar 

Programmers Dan Repp and Jordan Brown were both at SXSW this year and we asked them to let us know about some of the SciFi or SciFi-related films they caught there.  Unfortunately, Dan says Cthulhu ate his homework. But Bears was also there so he’s filling in. Here’s what they all had to say.

Jordan Brown on SciFi Shorts: Paul Briganti’s GREENER GRASS brings us a surreal other world that’s pretty horrific when you consider that it’s probably not that far off from how we currently “keep up with the Joneses.”  Two suburban soccer-moms balance a friendship-slash-rivalry that escalates in the first few minutes to Jill offering her infant daughter to Lisa (“Do you want her? You can have her.”)  Throw in strange disappearances, dog children, and spouse mix-ups and you have an alternate universe that’s creepy and alien, yet surely familiar to anyone who’s ever been to a children’s soccer game.  The two leads, Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe, have fantastic chemistry and play off of each other hilariously, so it’s not surprising that they also co-wrote and co-produced this oddity.  Sinister suburbanites are nothing new, but Greener Grass begs the question: is this merely a nightmarish alternate reality, or is it a scary predictor of a world to come?  

WHERE YOU ARE Writer-director Graham Parkes presents a jarring but lovely portrait of a young mother coming to terms with her mortality through a time-traveling search for her toddler son.  A game of hide-and-seek turns into an odyssey through her family’s life through the next 10 to 15 years (or rather, a mother’s worst nightmare of what that future might look like).  Where You Are is artfully shot and often very funny in showing protagonist Jen’s anxieties.  Actress Sarah Burns offers an impressively nuanced performance for such a short film runtime as she gradually begins to see the bigger picture.  Who knows what the future will bring?  All we have is the here and now.  So just enjoy playing hide-and-seek with your son.

Bears on OPERATOR: This Martin Starr / Mae Whitman dramedy was possible the most SciFi film of the festival. Starr plays a programmer in charge of the latest IVR (Interactive Voice Response) for a health company. Searching for sound that is both empathetic but also can take charge, he cajoles his wife (Whitman) into supplying the voice for the system. As he perfects the program, he becomes obsessed with his creation, and begins to prefer her over his wife. The film plays with issues of control and technology and perfection and manages to be quite funny at the same time. Whitman’s other job is as a performer with The Neo-Futurists, and their long-running production Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind, where she writes playlets exposing herself in search of the truth. They are funny and often heart-wrenching when she begins to examine her relationship with her husband. This is a solid film with great performances and a strong take away message to think about afterward.

Bears on SLASH: Neil is a shy teen boy with questions about his sexuality and a strange hobby – he writes erotic fan fiction. When Julia brings him out of his shell and encourages him, he ends up in the different world of comicons and men much too old for him coming on to him. And he also may be interested in Julia. It’s all a mess in his mind, which is what makes SLASH so wonderful.  It is a charming coming-of-age story where no one really figures anything out, except how to get by for the moment. Michael Johnston and Hannah Marks really nail their roles with humor and sensitivity so that we are always on both of their sides, even when they are angry at each other, and that’s a 

Bears on COLLECTIVE: UNCONSCIOUS: This one was not surprisingly frustrating, featuring five separate works by five directors (each interpreting another’s dream) As with any anthology project, the works are uneven. I like three of the five quite a bit. The opening film, shot in stark black and white and with a sort of post-apocalyptic setting, really held my imagination as I colored in around the story. It felt like a dream but had a really strong structure.  The third piece felt more like a stand alone short, but it was a great coming of age story dealing with self-identity and role models and that moment you realize you can be a leader.  Finally, there was a hilarious and cutting satire called ‘Everybody Dies,’ a children’s television show hosted by the grim reaper that basically prepared all the African-American viewers that they were going to die, and probably long before the white children.  It had such a strong message and style it almost overpowered the other films, most of which were sort of message-less.  The other two films (number 2 and number 5) in the anthology really felt like dreams, but in that weird sort of I have no idea what the fuck I just saw sort of way, so they were tiresome and dull, especially when placed alongside much stronger work, films which had meaning and substance.  Also frustrating was the connecting material which was basically a narrator putting us into trance to watch the films. Most of his dialogue felt lifted from the opening of a free mp3 download to like quit smoking or something and didn’t really add to the film. Apparently, the intent for this ‘film’ is/was to be a web series (that’s how it was promoted on Kickstarter) so maybe as individual pieces it works much better. As a whole, the film failed to say anything unifying about dream states or our collective unconscious and the filmmaking was too uneven to provide a fulfilling experience. As a SciFi film, it has a few really strong moments in the first short, and one that made me want to see a feature version of that world.

true victory.  Clay Liford has really made a special film. One that can help a lot of people, and maybe launch a new tentpole franchise -- in addition to the Comicon Setting, Slash has a hilarious SciFi film with a film that Neil is writing, Vanguard, staring Tishuan Scott as an over-sexed space mercenary.

Bears on SPACESHIP: No film was a bigger violator of the ‘forced quirk factor’ than this one which is about an alien abduction … maybe … that happens halfway through the film and then drops off its abductee only about thirty minutes later with very little changed. The characters are just plain weird for weirdness sake, and not compelling. The story goes no where extremely slowly, it’s like the first forty minutes of the film are just set up, and then its over before anything happens.  I liked the idea of this so much better than the actual film.

Bears on MIDNIGHT SPECIAL: Not sure there is much I can add to sway the discussion of this Jeff Nichols film that has already been crowned SciFi film of the year by many critics. Concerning a ‘special’ boy from somewhere not here, Nichols’ film follows two parents and a friend desperately trying to evade the government and get their child to whereever it is he thinks he needs to be.  THe problem with the film is that all the important character development happens before the film begins, and we are left with all the characters essentially playing the same emotion and intensity through the whole film.  So it was a bit exhausting, and one-note for me.  It looks amazing, and I am very interested in the world of the film.  But the director didn’t seem to be, so most of the film is an extended chase scene and a lot of people yelling.  

Bears on AMERICAN FABLE: Ann Hamilton’s coming-of-age story set in the eighties on a farm in the Midwest, may be more fantasy than SciFi, and even borderline of that, but it’s so good, I have to give it a shout-out. In the film, Gitty discovers a wealthy man being held hostage in her family’s silo and realizes that maybe her father is not as perfect as she believed. The world starts to crumble around her and her fantasies and nightmares start to invade her daily life. The magical realism of this film elevates it to another level, and cinematography is unbelievable. Although it is not as much of a fairy tale as the description would lead one to suppose, the lessons learned are the same and Peyton Kennedy delivers a magnificent performance as Gitty, a girl trapped between protecting her family and her soul.