Austin Film Festival Sees a Brighter Future on the Screen

In bleak times, it’s always a good idea to turn to cinema, and it seems that this year’s movies are meeting the moment, especially those screening Oct. 23-30 at the Austin Film Festival. “The stories that we have this year, I found really hopeful,” said festival founder and Executive Director Barbara Morgan. “For a while we were forced to watch with this sense of repeat, rinse, repeat, and there are some really great stories this year. … Maybe they haven’t truly abandoned the world of good storymaking.”

Moreover, the kind of stories that she’s seeing – whether as completed films or scripts submitted to the competitions – are changing. For the last five years, since the beginning of the pandemic, Morgan said she had seen “a lot of reaction filmmaking [that said], ‘This is going on in the world, I’m going to make this movie and talk about that.’” By contrast, she said 2025 is “a reflection year, which is a good sign for humanity. A lot of what we’re seeing coming in at the early stage from indie filmmakers and short filmmakers and screenplays is a lot of really reflective, thoughtful, looking back, ‘How can I be better?’ kind of content.”

She laughed. “And then we’re showing Knives Out.”

Not only will the festival host the Texas premiere of Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, but writer/director Rian Johnson will be in attendance to receive this year’s Bill Wittliff Award for Screenwriting. It’s a sign of his long relationship with the festival, going back to its screening of his 2005 debut, Brick. “He’s such a great writer,” Morgan said. “He’s a filmmaker, but he’s a writer.” Plus, he’ll host a panel with Mission: Impossible series helmer Christopher McQuarrie about time travel, “which Rian suggested last year when he was here.” Both directors have experience in temporal storytelling – Johnson with Looper, and McQuarrie with Edge of Tomorrow – “and they’ll be just talking about time travel movies and the allure of them,” Morgan added.

However, Johnson’s latest Benoit Blanc mystery is far from the only eagerly anticipated title on the schedule. This year, AFF continues to build on its reputation as the last festival stop before awards season, with screenings of new films from a host of Oscar-nominated and Oscar-winning directors and writers including Noah Baumbach (Jay Kelly), Park Chan-wook (No Other Choice), Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar (Train Dreams), and Chloé Zhao, whose adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s fictionalized biography of William Shakespeare, Hamnet, makes its Austin debut. Morgan admitted that she was unsure how anyone could bring that book to the screen, “but in my view Chloé Zhao knocked it out of the park. I was shocked at how incredible the adaptation was, and I would argue almost perfect.”

It’s not just directors and screenwriters who are standing out at this year’s festival. Morgan mentioned Hamnet star Jessie Buckley, saying, “She was great in [AFF 2022 selection] Women Talking but wow.” At the other end of the dramatic scale is Eternity, the new comedy about the afterlife. “That movie is so funny,” she said, “and so much more than it appears, and Elizabeth Olsen is incredible in it.”

Yet the woman of the festival is undoubtedly Friday Night Lights alum Adrianne Palicki, who appears in three films: Pickleheads, Sell Out, and The Long Shot. “She’s in everything,” Morgan said about the Austin resident. “She’s the patron saint of indie filmmakers. She has embraced living here, and in a time when all these people are moving into our small burg, and it’s no longer a small burg, and a lot of them are disconnected from our arts community, this woman is really invested and she really cares.”

This article appears in October 17 • 2025.