While there are still several days of buzzy film premieres remaining at SXSW 2024, all of the films playing in competition have screened for audiences and critics. The film festival’s jury announced the winners of the festival’s major awards on Thursday, giving out prizes for narrative feature, documentary feature, and a variety of short, episodic, and Xr categories.
The narrative feature competition was won by “Bob Trevino Likes It,” Tracie Laymon’s dramedy that stars Barbie Ferreira as a young woman who seeks to heal wounds from her relationship with her abusive father by befriending an unrelated man with the exact same name (John Leguizamo).
The top documentary prize went to Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls’ groundbreaking documentary “Grand Theft Hamlet,” which followed a group of actors staging a production of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” inside “Grand Theft Auto Online” during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Keep reading for a complete list...
The narrative feature competition was won by “Bob Trevino Likes It,” Tracie Laymon’s dramedy that stars Barbie Ferreira as a young woman who seeks to heal wounds from her relationship with her abusive father by befriending an unrelated man with the exact same name (John Leguizamo).
The top documentary prize went to Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls’ groundbreaking documentary “Grand Theft Hamlet,” which followed a group of actors staging a production of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” inside “Grand Theft Auto Online” during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Keep reading for a complete list...
- 3/14/2024
- by Christian Zilko
- Indiewire
A little girl with a dying father reaches out to the heavens for a spirit to protect her family, but what reaches back has other ideas in Benjamin Finkel’s SXSW Midnighters selection, Family. Having just moved across the country in an attempt to find new treatments for her father’s worsening cancer, young Johanna (Cameron Dawson Gray) has to start all over in a new place, and that’s tough. It certainly doesn’t help that her dad, Harry (Ben Chaplin) needs constant care and her mother Naomi (Ruth Wilson) is so beaten down by having to shoulder all of the family’s needs that their daughter is often the last priority. Johanna’s only solace is a little blue birdhouse, to which she believes she can lure a kind...
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[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...
- 3/14/2024
- Screen Anarchy
The South by Southwest Film & TV Festival has announced the 2024 Jury and Special Award winners.
This year’s narrative feature competition winner was “Bob Trevino Likes It,” which was directed and written by Tracie Laymon and stars Barbie Ferreira and John Leguizamo. Meanwhile, “Grand Theft Hamlet” topped the documentary feature competition.
“What an extraordinary week of film and TV premieres we’ve had here at SXSW, and there is more to come through Saturday,” said Claudette Godfrey, VP, Film & TV. “Our theaters have been bursting with incredible and vocal audiences celebrating the exceptional and diverse work in our lineup, and we’re so excited to celebrate this year’s jury and special award winners!”
The Audience Award voting will conclude on Saturday, March 16, and winners will be announced that week.
See the complete list of winners below.
Feature Film Grand Jury Awards
Narrative Feature Competition
Winner: “Bob Trevino Likes It”
Director/Screenwriter: Tracie Laymon,...
This year’s narrative feature competition winner was “Bob Trevino Likes It,” which was directed and written by Tracie Laymon and stars Barbie Ferreira and John Leguizamo. Meanwhile, “Grand Theft Hamlet” topped the documentary feature competition.
“What an extraordinary week of film and TV premieres we’ve had here at SXSW, and there is more to come through Saturday,” said Claudette Godfrey, VP, Film & TV. “Our theaters have been bursting with incredible and vocal audiences celebrating the exceptional and diverse work in our lineup, and we’re so excited to celebrate this year’s jury and special award winners!”
The Audience Award voting will conclude on Saturday, March 16, and winners will be announced that week.
See the complete list of winners below.
Feature Film Grand Jury Awards
Narrative Feature Competition
Winner: “Bob Trevino Likes It”
Director/Screenwriter: Tracie Laymon,...
- 3/14/2024
- by Michaela Zee
- Variety Film + TV
The attention-grabbing opening scene in writer/director Benjamin Finkel’s Family effectively establishes the film’s peculiar, esoteric, yet bone-chilling tone. Evoking Relic or Ari Aster’s Hereditary, the cold open sees preteen protagonist Johanna (Cameron Dawson Gray) banging on the locked doors of a synagogue, pleading to be let in, only for her mother, Naomi (Ruth Wilson), to stalk across the lawn, drag her out into it, then stab her. Without any explanation or context, Family cuts to a less volatile time, unfurling a strange, unwieldy slice of arthouse horror that’s heightened by Finkel’s knack for viscerally disturbing horror and imagery.
The eleven-year-old Johanna, an only child homeschooled by her mom, has recently been uprooted to mom’s creaky old childhood home for closer access to medical care for her father, Harry (Ben Chaplin), who’s slowly deteriorating from cancer. Things are stable enough to start, but...
The eleven-year-old Johanna, an only child homeschooled by her mom, has recently been uprooted to mom’s creaky old childhood home for closer access to medical care for her father, Harry (Ben Chaplin), who’s slowly deteriorating from cancer. Things are stable enough to start, but...
- 3/10/2024
- by Meagan Navarro
- bloody-disgusting.com
Once a taboo broken only by the boldest of directors, violence against children has become increasingly common in horror films. Credit (or blame) for this phenomenon — at least in its more recent incarnations — goes to “Hereditary,” a movie that boldly broke the once-sacred familial contract. There’s bound to be diminishing returns when other filmmakers start taking inspiration from such transgressions, however. Six years later, that brings us to “Family,” premiering at the 2024 edition of SXSW.
Directed by first-timer Benjamin Finkel, the film treads similar thematic territory to Aster’s film, but inverted, with a sci-fi/horror twist. “Family” begins with a quick, disturbing cold open, as 11-year-old Johanna (Cameron Dawson Gray) desperately bangs on the window of a building we later learn is the temple where her grandfather (Allan Corduner) serves as a rabbi. Then her mother (Ruth Wilson) comes up behind her, grabs her by her ankle, and...
Directed by first-timer Benjamin Finkel, the film treads similar thematic territory to Aster’s film, but inverted, with a sci-fi/horror twist. “Family” begins with a quick, disturbing cold open, as 11-year-old Johanna (Cameron Dawson Gray) desperately bangs on the window of a building we later learn is the temple where her grandfather (Allan Corduner) serves as a rabbi. Then her mother (Ruth Wilson) comes up behind her, grabs her by her ankle, and...
- 3/9/2024
- by Katie Rife
- Indiewire
The terror beneath the evil spirits and unexplained phenomena in Family is based on a cruel reality: a young girl’s well-founded dread of her father dying. In his self-assured first film, writer and director Benjamin Finkel wraps this fear in horror tropes, taking us inside the mind of a child imagining the worst. The film becomes increasingly tense and emotionally wrenching, even as Finkel ramps up genre touches that come to feel superfluous.
Johanna (Cameron Dawson Gray) is a lonely 11-year-old whose family has moved to another part of the country so her father can receive better cancer treatment. Finkel’s director’s statement makes it clear that this is a personal story, inspired by what he felt when his father suffered from cancer for much of Finkel’s childhood. Echoing that experience, the film is almost entirely from Johanna’s point of view. From the start we are in her nightmares and imagination,...
Johanna (Cameron Dawson Gray) is a lonely 11-year-old whose family has moved to another part of the country so her father can receive better cancer treatment. Finkel’s director’s statement makes it clear that this is a personal story, inspired by what he felt when his father suffered from cancer for much of Finkel’s childhood. Echoing that experience, the film is almost entirely from Johanna’s point of view. From the start we are in her nightmares and imagination,...
- 3/9/2024
- by Caryn James
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
This article appears in the SXSW 2024 issue of Den of Geek magazine. Check out all of our SXSW coverage here.
“A revenge ghost story with elements of a monster movie” is how Irish helmer Damian McCarthy describes his latest chiller, which is set to bring “plenty of scares and a few a few laughs” to SXSW’s late-night line-up. A supernatural horror centered around spooky trinkets, Oddity follows a blind medium (You Are Not My Mother’s Carolyn Bracken) as she uncovers the truth behind her twin sister’s death with the help of a terrifying wooden mannequin.
“She collects a lot of haunted items—she can pick up an object and tell you everything about it,” explains McCarthy, the writer/director of 2020’s psychological thriller Caveat and celebrated horror short He Dies at the End. Not only does one of these objects—the aforementioned “wooden man”—help her to catch her sister’s killer,...
“A revenge ghost story with elements of a monster movie” is how Irish helmer Damian McCarthy describes his latest chiller, which is set to bring “plenty of scares and a few a few laughs” to SXSW’s late-night line-up. A supernatural horror centered around spooky trinkets, Oddity follows a blind medium (You Are Not My Mother’s Carolyn Bracken) as she uncovers the truth behind her twin sister’s death with the help of a terrifying wooden mannequin.
“She collects a lot of haunted items—she can pick up an object and tell you everything about it,” explains McCarthy, the writer/director of 2020’s psychological thriller Caveat and celebrated horror short He Dies at the End. Not only does one of these objects—the aforementioned “wooden man”—help her to catch her sister’s killer,...
- 3/8/2024
- by Alec Bojalad
- Den of Geek
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