South by Southwest

...I'm not going this year, but my buddy Stephen Saito, who does Premiere.com's news page, is, and you should look to Premiere's home page for his coverage starting soon. If I were going to the Festival, I'd have some conflicts of interest going on: four friends with two films that, yes, I do like very much, are making it to the fest, and as official selections, yet.

The first is the feature doc Fish Kill Flea, by Brian Cassidy, Aaron Hillis, and Jennifer Loeber. It's the story of a once-thriving upstate N.Y. mall that, at the time of shooting, had been pretty much gutted and turned into the site of a massive, and massively eccentric, flea market. Flea has a great, early-Errol-Morris feel for American weirdness as it captures the catch-as-catch-can merchants of all kinds of flotsam facing eviction from what is likely their last haven.

If Hillis' name is familar to you, it should be—he is a longtime contributor to both the print edition and the Premiere website. He's also got his own kick-ass website, Cinephiliac, which is now on a kind of break so Aaron can attend to Flea—which has its own kick-ass website—and another venture I'll plug another time. Jennifer Loeber is a talented photog (from March 13 through 24 her work will be part of a the Humble Arts Foundation's group show, at New Century Artists,
530 West 25th Street, Suite 406), as is Mr. Cassidy...

Brian and collab Melanie Shatzky also have a short (9 minutes) doc at SXSW, God Provides, which was also part of a docs program at Sundance, where I first saw it. It's a series of portraits of people crawling from the wreckage of a natural disaster, and the various coping mechanisms they employ. It's a cogent and sickly surreal piece, made all the more potent by its brevity.

My wife Claire and I hold Brian in special esteem because—aside from his being brilliant and a fun guy to hang out with—he shot our wedding. And did a pretty great job, as our friends and relatives will be able to see when we finally get around to posting the shots (sorry guys!). In the meantime, here's a personal fave sample of his work, a pic of the beautiful Claire and my equally adorable niece Madison.

Best of luck to Brian, Melanie, Aaron and Jennifer—the fest looks very good this year, and you guys deserve to be part of it.