November 15, 2017

Apply to Exhibit at SXSW Create 2018

In its sixth year, SXSW Create returns to the Palmer Events Center, March 10-11, 2018. This two-day, community-driven event celebrates all aspects of the maker ecosystem and offers hands-on excitement for all ages and imaginations.

New for 2018

For the first time, we’re fusing a hackathon with a maker fair at the same event and connecting them with the tiny house movement, which addresses affordable housing and sustainable living.

By 3D printing a tiny house at SXSW Create, we’ll build a community of collaborators. Yes, we will be 3D printing a tiny house in two days!

Are you ready to upgrade your hacker or maker skills? Open-source hardware, software, robotics, automation, drones, 3D printing, 3D modeling, advanced manufacturing, art installations, and tiny houses will all be part of this year’s event.

Exhibit at SXSW Create

We’re looking for companies and organizations with a passion for hardware, hacking, maker spaces, robots, and everything in-between to showcase and share their passions with our attendees and us.

If you’re involved in hardware, science, technology, 3D printing, fabrication, creative technology solutions, bio-art, hacker/maker spaces, the internet of things, robots, artists, STEAM, drones, or making, and interested in having a presence at SXSW Create, please contact us.

Apply For An Underwritten Space

Because SXSW Create is an event for the creative community, we’re giving all types of makers and creators the opportunity to exhibit and share their passions with all ages and imaginations. If you are a non-corporate organization, an educator, an amateur innovator/maker, or an early stage startup company, you can apply for an underwritten space.

Happy creating!

The post Apply to Exhibit at SXSW Create 2018 appeared first on SXSW.

Source: SxSW Film

November 15, 2017

From the StoryCorps App: First Thanksgivings

Did you know that the stories you hear from us on NPR and our podcast are excerpts of interviews pulled from the StoryCorps Archive? Participants visit one of our recording locations with a friend or family member to record a 40-minute interview with the help of a trained StoryCorps Facilitator, or record a conversation using the StoryCorps App. We’re sharing this unedited interview from the StoryCorps Archive with you in its original form.

Thanksgiving is one of the biggest holidays celebrated in the United States, but if you grew up in another country, you may not have celebrated, or even heard of, the holiday. Listen as three immigrants share their stories about their first Thanksgivings and the new traditions they’ve created with their families.

Jayashree Patale emigrated to the United States from India. In her StoryCorps App interview, she tells her granddaughter, Tara, about her first Thanksgiving in America. Jayashree had never heard of the holiday, but she tells Tara about a welcoming neighbor who invited her over for dinner to share in their traditions. “I was a little shy at the time,” she says, “but everybody made me so comfortable.” 

Jayashree tells the story of being served sliced turkey and not realizing it was meat. She happily finished her meal even though she’s a vegetarian! “I said, uh oh!  But it’s all right, it doesn’t matter whether I ate meat or not,” she says, “I had a great time, and I really appreciated that people were so loving.”

Valerie Cecil, who grew up in England, tells Joaquin Borja about celebrating Harvest Festival Suppers growing up.  She never celebrated Thanksgiving, though, until she married her husband, who is from Texas. She talks about the first year they celebrated it together, when they were living in Egypt. “He invited several of the American families who were on their own there over to our house for Thanksgiving,” she says. “So I had to learn how to cook pumpkin and pecan pie!”

Valerie shares some of the traditions she’s now passed down to her children and describes the five-course meals she prepares every year for the holiday. One round involves a mystery sorbet that her guests have to guess the ingredients of.

Amanda Lacson asks Mike Alvarez what traditions his family started when they came to the United States from the Philippines. “The first thing that popped into my mind is Thanksgiving,” he says, “but I think Filipinos, or at least my family, will use any occasion to celebrate and prepare food!”

He describes the eclectic dinners his family would have, “Someone did make a turkey with stuffing — but it would also be accompanied by traditional Filipino cuisine,” he laughs, “Like pancit, turon, lumpia…  The turkey would still be at the center of the table, but the perimeter would be Filipino food.”

All material within the StoryCorps collection is copyrighted by StoryCorps. StoryCorps encourages use of material on this site by educators and students without prior permission, provided appropriate credit is given. This interview has not been fact-checked, and may contain sensitive personal information about living persons.

Source: SNPR Story Corps

November 14, 2017

Filmmaker In Focus: The Light of the Moon, Maya Dardel, and Lane 1974

The Light of the Moon, Maya Dardel (screened at SXSW as A Critically Endangered Species), and Lane 1974 premiered at the 2017 SXSW Film Festival in our Narrative Feature Competition and Narrative Spotlight sections. Take a closer look at these films exploring three unique female perspectives with our Q&A with the directors below. Check out our alumni blogs to find out where you can watch these films.

The Light of the Moon

Jessica M. Thompson is an Emmy-nominated Australian filmmaker, who founded Stedfast Productions, a collective of visual storytellers, in NYC in 2011. She has worked as an editor with Academy Award-nominated filmmaker, Liz Garbus, and on Cheryl Furjanic’s award-winning documentary, Back On Board. The Light of the Moon is her directorial feature debut, the film won the Audience Award for Narrative Feature Competition.

Q: Tell us a little about your film?

JT: My film is about Bonnie – a sassy, sophisticated New York City architect – whose life is irrevocably changed when she is out one evening with her friends. Afterwards, she struggles to regain the intimacy she once had with her long-term boyfriend, Matt, and to retake control of her life. The film basically deals with the first stage of grief: denial.

Q: What motivated you to tell this story?

JT: I was sick of seeing rape so casually and unrealistically used as a plot-point, or for dramatic effect, in mainstream films and television shows (typically by male writers). After having two friends experience the trauma of assault, and seeing the infinite amount of victim-blaming in the headlines, I felt compelled to tell a story that is steeped in reality. Despite the likelihood of being dubbed “the rape film,” the assault actually happens in the first 10 minutes, and the film largely focuses on Bonnie’s struggle to accept the truth and the impact it has had on her life. It doesn’t focus on the courtroom drama, as that’s (unfortunately) not typically how violence against women concludes, nor does the film become a unlikely tale of revenge. It is a quiet drama about one woman’s recovery. I simply felt this story was one I had not seen told before, and I felt it was due-time to tell it.

Q: What do you want the audience to take away from this film?

JT: I’m hoping the film will provoke thought, stir emotion, and start a conversation or two.

Maya Dardel

Magdalena Zyzak studied film and literature at USC. She is the author of a novel, The Ballad of Barnabas Pierkel. Zachary Colter is an award-winning poet, author of five books of poetry, fiction and literary criticism. He studied poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Maya Dardel is the pair’s directorial debut.

Q: Tell us a little about your film?

ZC/MZ: The film tells the story of the final weeks leading up to the disappearance (and presumable death) of Maya Dardel, an internationally respected poet and novelist who lived, until 2016, in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. Maya announces on National Public Radio that she intends to end her life and that young male writers may compete to become executor of her estate. The man who wins will inherit Maya’s home, land, books, unpublished manuscripts, and be expected to protect and promote her posthumous reputation.

Q: What motivated you to tell this story?

ZC/MZ: We see Maya Dardel as the first film in a diptych (linked by theme and form, not characters) intended to explore a certain colder category of female power/intelligence, a category undervalued in America, as the recent election has illustrated. Our protagonist, Maya, is unsentimental, acerbic, and unapologetically threatening to the young men she encounters. She is not “soulful” or “motherly.” Her positions stress strength and reject victimhood.

It’s also a film about writers. We come to filmmaking from literary backgrounds and wanted to make a film about writers today, exploring the tragicomedy of a literary vocation at the end of print culture, at a time when MFA programs have replaced Parisian cafes and an aesthetics-first engagement with language is disappearing. The men who compete for Maya’s estate exemplify, in non-stereotypical, non-reductive ways, four kinds of youngish writers one might encounter in the graduate creative writing programs of the United States today.

Q: What do you want the audience to take away from this film?

ZC/MZ: We hope the film might function as an elegy for the pre-digital humanities, for ink and paper poetry, and for an important generation of writers; Maya’s generation, though obviously very much alive, is losing the attention of young people, losing readers. We hope, too, that some will appreciate a film about complex psychological and erotic games.

Lane 1974

SJ Chiro graduated from Bennington College with a degree in theater and French literature. She spent much of her early career as an actor and director in Seattle’s theater scene and has since directed several award-winning short films.

Q: Tell us a little about your film?

SJC: This film is based on the memoir by Clane Hayward, The Hypocrisy of Disco. It’s 1974. 13-year-old Lane lives on a beautiful Northern California commune, wild and free, until her mother, a rebel and iconoclast, alienates their small group from the security and safety of the community land. They begin moving from one unlikely situation to another, leaving normal life far behind.

Scrounging for food and hitch-hiking, while her mother cadges cash and begs favors, Lane and her siblings rely on one another in an increasingly desolate and isolated emotional landscape. Desperate and forgotten, Lane sets out alone in search of a future she’s always imagined, but cannot conceive.

Q: What motivated you to tell this story?

SJC: This is the film that would not get out of my way. It dogged me. I was obsessed with telling this story before I died. I felt if I didn’t, maybe a generation of childhoods would be lost. There are so many of us children of revolutionary, forward-thinking, flawed parents who lived deeply unconventional childhoods, but most of us don’t talk about our childhoods. I felt it was time to change that.

Q: What do you want the audience to take away from this film?

SJC: I hope people will realize that the hippies of the 1970s were more than the butts of jokes. They were real people trying to find a way out of a terrible time in our history. They were bold and dared to live in physical discomfort for the comfort of not participating in a sick society. They chose to live the ultimate American Dream: that of embracing freedom above all else. What was forgotten was children did not have that choice. We are entering a new time of political and social turmoil. To move forward, it’s important to remember, and learn from, the past.

Join Us For SXSW 2018

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See you in March!

The post Filmmaker In Focus: The Light of the Moon, Maya Dardel, and Lane 1974 appeared first on SXSW.

Source: SxSW Film