My first South By Southwest experience has been dominated by documentaries so far. Over my first two days of the fest, I’ve seen five films, and four of them were docs.
I arrived in Austin at a little after one in the afternoon on Monday. After checking in at the convention center to obtain my badge and any pertinent information I needed, I headed straight to the Alamo Drafthouse on South Lamar Blvd. As soon as I realized that the S. Lamar Alamo was one of the seven venues showing films for SXSW, I knew that’s where I should start, since I was already familiar with the location. I spent eight days there for Fantastic Fest 2022, after all.
Pulling into the parking garage adjacent to the theater felt like coming home. I quickly scanned the programming schedule to see what screenings were about to start. Knowing next to nothing about my options, I fortuitously landed on an excellent way to start off the fest.
First time filmmaker Ken August Meyer has made an intensely personal documentary in Angel Applicant. In the film, Meyer explores his deteriorating body which has been ravaged by the pernicious autoimmune disease scleroderma. The condition causes a host of issues, one of them being that the sufferer’s joints become calcified and unusable. It turned Meyer’s hands into, as he describes them, claws. We see Meyer undergo a procedure to fuse some of his knuckles so that the doctor can reposition Meyer’s fingers in order for him to grasp objects more easily.
Meyer, who has a background in art and works in advertising, explores his ailment through the lens of another artist who lived and worked with the disease. Swiss-German artist Paul Klee, who was a major influence on modern art in the first third of the 20th century, dealt with his own case of scleroderma through his art. By examining Klee’s output in the last five years or so of his life, Meyer draws a parallel to his own situation with an emphasis on empathy and living every day to its fullest. It’s a moving portrait of the artist as a sick – but, crucially, optimistic and contemplative – man.
Up next was a reappraisal of the most popular (and simultaneously despised) American artist of the last fifty years. Art for Everybody tracks the life and career of Thomas Kinkade, the self-proclaimed “painter of light.” Director Miranda Yousef explores the ways in which Kinkade endeared himself to his millions of fans, people who had traditionally been left out of conversations about fine art. Yousef’s film had the blessing of Kinkade’s family – his widow and daughters all sat for interviews and gave Yousef access to the late artist’s vault of archives – but she gives equal time to the art critics who derided Kinkade’s work as overly sentimental and bordering on authoritarian.
Kinkade built an enormous empire and we see him slowly succumb to alcohol abuse as he – from the view of the documentary (as well as his family) – tried and failed to reconcile his public image with the complex and varied facets of his personality; facets that he could only indulge in at the peril of his vast fortune and fame. Yousef oversells the decidedly un-Thomas Kinkade pieces the artist squirreled away in that vault, but her ruminations on how no human being is only one thing are unassumingly revelatory.
Day two of SXSW saw the first screening from which I was turned away. As a result of the wasted time spent standing in line and shuttle hopping between venues, I could only fit in three screening instead of the planned four. Two more documentaries and my first feature at the fest made for a mixed day of viewing.
A Disturbance in the Force: How the Star Wars Holiday Special Happened is a standard talking-heads documentary that suffers from a manic editing style in which one talking-head interview after another is strung endlessly together. The heavy use of dramatic Star Wars-sounding music tries to prod the audience into believing what’s being discussed is more exciting and interesting than it actually is. As a Star Wars fan, and someone who has tried twice to get through the infamous holiday special (I fell asleep both times, that’s how bad it is) A Disturbance in the Force is a good enough time. It’s certainly not groundbreaking, and doesn’t present any information that you couldn’t easily find on Wikipedia. The Donnie and Marie show salute to Star Wars clips are fairly hilarious, though.
Much better is Lagueria Davis’s Black Barbie: A Documentary. As we discover in the film, Davis has a personal connection to the first Black Barbie that the Mattel toy company ever released. Through interviews with the people who fought (and are continuing to fight) for inclusivity in the toy industry, Davis asks hard questions about how our society centers whiteness and how that has an effect on children before they even have the vocabulary to articulate it.
During the Q&A which followed the screening, Davis confided to us that the original rough cut of her film was eight-and-a-half hours long. The editor for Black Barbie was also at the screening, and she, along with one of the film’s producers, discussed how they thought at one point they might actually have a limited-series on their hands. The end result feels a little scattered, but Davis has crafted an official record for a long-overlooked and neglected part of pop culture history. She also takes the time to make the case that we might not have come as far as we’d like to believe with regard to representation in a historically white space.
My last screening of the day was a bit of a misfire, and my first narrative feature of the fest. Peak Season is a romantic comedy that isn’t terribly funny, although the romance is quietly effective. Set in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, home of the absolutely gorgeous and majestic Grand Teton National Park, Henry Loevner and Steven Kanter’s movie suffers from its formulaic romcom plot and woefully uninspired dialog. The landscapes of the Grand Tetons at Loevner and Kanter’s disposal make for absolutely stunning compositions, but beautiful scenery does not automatically translate to a compelling movie.
Onward!