SXSW London returns for its second edition this June, bringing its multifaceted tangle of film, TV, music, technology and culture back to East London. This year, the festival has made things a little easier by centralising its campus around the Truman Brewery, while also dividing the Screen Festival into six strands: Headliners, Competition, Heartwarmers, Collisions, Shivers and Visionaries. In practical terms, that means a mixture of prestige premieres, global discoveries, genre oddities, crowd-pleasers and various uncategorisable items.
The Screen Festival kicks things off with the Headliners strand, which includes Peter Glanz’s Savage House, a satirical takedown of the upper classes starring Richard E. Grant and Claire Foy. High on our list is Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, a psychosexual horror starring Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson and directed by Jane Schoenbrun, whose previous work (I Saw The TV Glow, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair) has already secured them a place among the most interesting filmmakers working in the haunted space between screen and identity. On the more literary end of the spectrum, Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day promises an un-romantic comedy of love and astronomy based on Woolf’s novel.
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Elsewhere, the programme’s genre offerings look pleasingly rich. In the Shivers strand, The Night looks like one for lovers of folk-horror, with Paul Urkijo Alijo’s 17th-century Basque Country tale bringing witches into the spotlight. The Visionaries strand, meanwhile, offers Amoeba, the debut feature from Siyou Tan, which centres on a new student at an elite all-girls school, who decides that fitting in is less appealing than forming a girl gang. Another Visionaries film that looks promising is Embers, a pitch-black Chinese drama in which a crematorium worker mixes up two sets of ashes with deadly consequences, which is exactly the sort of exciting premise that makes programme-browsing worthwhile.
Despite its cosy title, the Heartwarmers strand appears to contain at least a few thorns. The Invite is likely to be one of the big crowd-pullers, with Olivia Wilde directing and starring alongside Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton in what is billed as an emotionally honest portrait of human relationships. Over in Collisions, Winter of the Crow brings Lesley Manville to Cold War-era Warsaw for a tense thriller based on a story by Nobel Prize-winning author Olga Tokarczuk, while David Pablos’ On the Road trails a young sex worker who falls for an older truck driver while on the run. In Competition, The Red Hangar looks like a strong contender, as a Chilean thriller set during the military coup, centred on an Air Force Captain forced to choose between duty and morality.
