After weeks spent holed up with screeners and furiously editing copy for our SXSW Film issue, it was great to finally put names and films to faces at last night’s Chronicle-sponsored SXSW Film Bash at La Zona Rosa. It was a packed house, and everybody seemed to be enjoying the hell out of themselves. (Those little blue drink tickets certainly helped grease the wheels, although I had to hit up the Luv Doc for replacements after I foolishly tossed mine, thinking, um, they were for a raffle or something.)
I met Joe Swanberg as he was chatting up filmmaker and Chronicle contributor Spencer Parsons. Swanberg – who sold his Nights and Weekends to IFC Entertainment – said that even if he’d never hooked up with SXSW, he’d still be making movies, but that because of SXSW – and especially Matt Dentler – he had an audience for those movies.
There were lots of faces there that we profiled in last week’s issue, like David Modigliani, David Zellner, and Alex Karpovsky (whose portrait I dug so much I’m linking to it again. Go on. It’s totally worth it.)
But the nicest moment of all was when, on my way out of the party, I met Nerdcore Rising filmmakers Negin Farsad and Andrew Mendelson. The crowd-pleasing doc is Farsad’s first film; she told me that she got a little emotional when she opened up last week’s Chronicle and read Josh Rosenblatt’s writeup of her film – Nerdcore‘s first-ever press in print. Just doing our job, ma’am.
This article appears in March 7 • 2008.
