SXSW Film Festival: Last News

Music, by and large, can be seen as autobiographical; it’s far from uncommon for songwriters not to draw from any number of personal experiences encompassing, say, the lows of heartbreak and loss to life’s triumphs, all of which and more could easily reside within the average person as distant memories but attain a sort of immortality once this narrative is set to music.

What a way to start your marketing campaign. The poster for Amazon Studios/Prime Video’s “Road House” movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal was released today, the trailer arrives tomorrow, and the always-mercurial director of the film, Doug Liman, has unfortunately picked the worst time to announce he’s boycotting the movie.

Well, it’s that time of year again, isn’t it? The Sundance Film Festival hasn’t even happened, the Berlin Film Festival line-up is not even out or complete, and we’re already looking ahead to March and the SXSW Film & Television Festival. There’s no rest for the wicked.

Married in 2013, while Oscar-winning filmmakers Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin both had been making and shooting films before they met (Chin, “Reel Rock 7,” Vasarhelyi, “Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love“), the power of their collaborative work was instantaneous. 2015’s breathtaking high stakes “Meru” was one of the most harrowing mountain climbing docs ever made up until that point, and they managed to somehow even one-up it with their Oscar-winning doc, the vertiginous and death-defying “Free Solo.” READ MORE: SXSW 2023 Preview: 25 Must-See Film & TV Projects To Watch Since then, the duo has turned their love for the outdoors, the environment and landscape, and their innate curiosity about the natural world into some riveting documentaries, many of them fueled by the same ticking-clock adrenaline of “Meru” and “Free Solo” (see 2021’s Thai Cave rescue doc, “The Rescue”).

Like any good science documentary, “Human Nature” starts with a hypothesis. The filmmakers posit that audiences are bored by the dry format of most science docs, but that there is a better strategy to present complex concepts about biology in such a way that both educates and entertains. That’s hardly a novel idea, dating back at least as far as Walt Disney’s “True-Life Adventure” series and advanced by everything from Imax to “Schoolhouse Rock!” over the years. Still, the team behind “Human Nature” are innovating with adult viewers in mind, and to test their theory, they’ve taken a subject that’s getting lots of attention, but only limited understanding: CRISPR.