With a spotlight on the Asia-Pacific region, but inclusive of all corners of the globe, the SXSW Sydney 2023 Screen Festival will bring together screen creatives to deliver an experience at the forefront of discovery, creativity and innovation. With an aim to platform, showcase and support the most exciting new voices, new forms and new ways of creating on Screen, this year’s Screen Festival looks to celebrate established creators who are challenging the form in the APAC region and beyond.
Running between October 15th and 21st, the SXSW Sydney 2023 Screen Festival will include red carpet premieres at the ICC’s Darling Theatre and cinemas across the inner city; an XR showcase, conference sessions, activations, parties and meet-ups, mentoring sessions; and ‘Minimart’, a SXSW Sydney-flavoured Screen market for investors, buyers, producers, creatives and industry; a casual way to cut deals.
Alongside the announcement of speakers and industry leaders taking part across the festival, including Bluey‘s Joff Bush, Leah Purcell, Marc Fennell, Osher Günsberg and Queer Eye‘s Tan France, a first taste of films screening at SXSW Sydney Screen Festival have been announced aligning with the broader event’s themes of Music, Games and Tech & Innovation.
Australia’s first filmic representation arrives in the form of You’ll Never Find Me, centring around a lonely mobile home resident and their unexpected visitor on the night of a relentless thunderstorm. Rolling Stones muse Anita Pallenberg and artist Tierra Whack are the respective focuses of US entries, Anita and Cypher, the latter a fictional pseudo-music documentary, whilst Indonesian rap star Brian Imanuel (Rich Brian) stars as an up-and-coming musician in Jamojaya.
The bass-heavy and neon-coloured portrait of alternative Chinese youth earns its focus in the joint US/CN production The Last Year of Darkness, which complements the rags-to-riches, boy-meets-girl story of Gagaland, set against a viral Chinese dance craze flooding streets and social media feeds.
Japanese cinema is represented with entrants Plastic, about teenagers Juna and Ibuki and their quest to find the psychedelic rock band Exne Kedy, and Tokyo Uber Blues, about an in-debt graduate Film Student and their turn to Uber driving to make ends meet.
Rounding out the first wave of films is Knit’s Island, which documents some of the 963 hours the directors spent in the videogame “DayZ” – a form of survivalist fiction – and their experience with the at-times unsettling blurring of the real and the virtual.
“With just under three months to go, this is the first time we’ve been able to hint at the scope of the inaugural SXSW Sydney. Never before have this many entrepreneurs, artists, futurists, innovators and titans of every industry all been in Sydney at one time. As we pull together over 1,000 events and experiences, our team are still searching for a poster big enough to reveal it all, ” stated Managing Director of SXSW Sydney, Colin Daniels. “After 19 visits to SXSW in Austin over the years, I can’t wait to see what we think of as ‘the United Nations of the creative industries’ here in Sydney.”
For further information on this year’s SXSW Sydney, head to the official site for tickets, event schedules and pitch submissions.
