Open Festival Season

"We're trying to bring exposure to the largest audience possible," says Austin-based performance artist and fest director DJ P.O.W. "That's where the term 'Blowin' Up a Spot' came from: I'm taking a smaller situation and enlarging it to make people consider something that they might not have considered before."

P.O.W.'s (Poet on Watch) home-brewed women's film festival has been active since the former NBC videographer decided to jump ship and strike out on her own in the name of women's filmmaking. This being Austin, she knew the best way to do that was by creating her own fest from scratch, although the Blowin' Up a Spot! Film Fest has resided in several other Texas cities, notably Houston, before coming to rest at the Carver Museum in Austin.

This year's program includes not just films but also DJs, actors, poets, and performance artists from across the country, all united under P.O.W.'s femme-centric banner. "Men are welcome to come and help out, get on a crew, but as far as showcasing work, it's a women's film festival," says P.O.W.

"It's a venue for women to show their work. What happens with [female filmmakers] is that we tend to get into a situation where we submit work to a South by Southwest Film Festival or a Sundance Film Festival or any of the bigger organizations, and we end up competing against the type of films people see on a daily basis – bang-bang gangster films and more commercial productions. But women's stories are not those stories. The technical qualities of the films we're screening can compete with any film on the market, but these are stories about family, about community, about the earth, about making babies – they're not mainstream stories."

Featuring roughly 30 films and six workshops (Sexy Bits for the Screen sounds promising) over four days, plus a Thursday night networking blowout that promises to be more funky-cool than anything else you're likely to stumble across, it's not only P.O.W.'s baby, it's another jewel in the Austin film community's bang-bang, indie-film scepter.

And then there's the 30th Annual Banff Mountain Film Festival, sponsored by Whole Earth Provision Co., Patagonia, and Dunham Bootmakers, a traveling fest that arrives in Austin for one day only this Sunday and should give the vertically challenged some idea of what's happening atop various global mountain peaks and within all manner of gnarly crevasses.

Spotlighting "mountain culture" (i.e., climbing, snowboarding, kayaking, and "desert crack climbing") Banff's three-hour program brings together both documentary and experimental shorts in a cohesive, heady whole that'll likely bring, not only the noise and the pain, but also the vertigo.

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Blowin' Up a Spot

Thursday-Sunday, April 27-30

Carver Museum (1165 Angelina)

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Banff Mountain

Sunday, April 30, 6pm

Paramount Theatre (713 Congress)