Broadcast Signal Intrusion
Watching Jacob Gentry’s
Broadcast Signal Intrusion is similar to following yarn pulled across a bulletin board. From one clue to another, the film shoots through the mystery of an unsettling pirate broadcast – pushing pins in different places where answers might be. Are those answers real?
Maybe, but the truth gets murky in rabbit holes. But the paranoia and obsession on display from James (Harry Shum Jr.), a video archivist caught up in the film’s conspiracy, is clear.
The film is set in 1999-era Chicago, with much of period-setting coming from the outdated tech decorating James’ apartment and life. He’s stuck rewinding through the past – transferring tapes to CD for work with his wife’s death a recurring VCR whine underneath. Harry Shum Jr. plays the character with a haunted air, grief repressed into the hardest of emotional walls to protect himself. That is, until he becomes consumed with finding the creator of a series of signal inte
Introducing, Selma Blair
Selma Blair’s escape from the world is her backyard pool: a safe space where she goes to free herself from the pain of her MS (Multiple Sclerosis), a disease that eats away at her immune system, resulting in nerve damage that prevents her brain and body from communicating.
For the SXSW documentary
Cruel Intentions and
Hellboy star the space to explore and show her tears, anguish, and bad days in front of a camera.
The first time Blair uses the comfort of her backyard pool to open up, she’s dressed in white lace. The day is cloudy, and dark, and feels empty, a setting fit for the story she is recollecting. Blair reflects on her 2016 airplane meltdown, a time before she realized she had MS, when she abused alcohol and pills to numb her pain. Broken toys are scattered across her yard, and she sits in her hot tub, water soaking her dress, sharing her deepest regret as a parent. There’s a sense of loneliness that’s hard to escape, a feeling of exhau
Wildflowers sessions, as captured in new SXSW documentary
Tom Petty: Somewhere You Feel Free (Image Courtesy of Tom Petty Legacy, LLC / Warner Music Group)
In the early Nineties, nearly two decades into a Hall of Fame rock career with his band the Heartbreakers, Tom Petty needed to make a change. Frustrated by his record label and with his marriage dissolving, he tapped Rick Rubin for a solo project. 1994 s
Wildflowers became his biggest album and redefined Petty s career.
Wildflowers built up in him over the course of those two decades since that first album in 1976, acknowledges longtime
Rolling Stone writer/editor and SXSW loyalist David Fricke, who wrote the liner notes for last year s expansive box set
Count yourself lucky if you’ve never had the awkward experience of trying to mend fences IRL after an argument on social media. What was intended as a way to connect with others at times has an isolating effect, and with the distance afforded by the platforms, we’re often not our best selves online.
In a SXSW Online panel titled “Unravelling the Social Dilemma,” Jeremy Hollow of Listen & Learn Research and Jillian Ney, digital behavioral scientist at the Social Intelligence Lab, dove into the complex issues around social media and proposed possible solutions for its problems. The thesis: Social media is a child, and we must help it mature.
Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché
X-Ray Spex singer and punk maverick Poly Styrene (born Marianne Joan Elliott-Said) intended to publish a book of diary entries in her final years. Following her death from cancer in 2011, daughter Celeste Bell inherited management of her mother s pioneering legacy, leading to the 2019 coffeetable read
Dayglo!: The Poly Styrene Story.
The artwork, writings, and family ties now coalesce in
Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché, debuting stateside at South by Southwest.
Co-directed with Paul Sng and co-written with music biographer Zoë Howe, the documentary focuses on Styrene s life offstage. It was really important to me to get this whole other side to her out there, explains Bell. We focused on what was happening in the world, socially, and the relationship between me and my mother. Those were more important than the ins and outs of making music, because she was very spontaneous. She wrote songs in her head while walking around the supermarket.