Two weeks ago, I signed off at the end of my SXSW 2025 post-mortem by looking ahead to the upcoming Dallas International Film Festival. Please allow me to now pull a Tarantino and go back to the week before SXSW started. In the crush of activity over the four days between what I’m about to describe and the first day of South By – it was a flurry of laundry, the day job (because I’m only given so much PTO in a given year!), and preparing for my trip down to Austin – I barely had time to recover from another film festival (let alone getting anything written about it) before I was out the door again.
But I need to go back even further.