Anna Daniels
The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has effectively brought Hollywood to a standstill as movie theaters, businesses, and public spaces shutter out of abundance of caution for the virus. The first to feel these effects were film festivals, which thrive in all of the above, and grant indie filmmakers a wider audience and outreach than they could hope through their own limited resources.
Now with film festivals essentially cancelled for the foreseeable future, a few indie filmmakers are taking things into their own hands. The South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas, apart from spotlighting films and technology, also holds a SXSW Episodic Pilot Competition, rewarding promising TV pilots that debut at the festival. Left without a festival to debut their pilots, a group of filmmakers selected for the competition have banded together to launch a SXSW 2020 Pilot Showcase on Vimeo.
In the wake of the cancelled 2020 SXSW Film Festival, a group of filmmakers behind five TV pilots selected for the festival’s pilot competition are launching a SXSW 2020 Pilot Showcase on Vimeo “to preview diversity led pilots from the festival for free to global audiences.”
The filmmakers reached out to Vimeo to hold their special showcase, which features five SXSW 2020 Film Festival episodic pilots, a few of which have been screened for critics. /Film’s Amelia Emberwing praised The Dream, This Isn’t Me, and Bored in her reviews for the SXSW pilots. But the filmmakers hope to reach more ears than just critics.
“We saw a need to pivot on the cancellation of SXSW and open up conversations with online platforms about how to now connect with an audience — at a time when connection feels more important than ever,” said Coral Amiga and Nicole Hartley, co-creators of the pilot Bored.
You can go to the pilot showcase here.
Below are the select titles with links to Vimeo:
Documentary, LGBTQ
Director: Rachel Anderson; Screenwriter: Rachel Anderson, Mary Duong
Comedy, LGBTQ
Director: Georgia Oakley; Screenwriter: Coral Amiga & Nicole Hartley
Comedy
Director: Alfredo de Villa; Screenwriter: Nick Morton, David Conolly
Comedy
Director: Ron Najor; Screenwriter: Trevor Fernando, Ron Najor
Homecoming: The Journey of Cardboard
Documentary
Director: Yuko Shiomaki, Anna Thorson Mayer
Comedy, LGBTQ
Director: Adrian Rojas Elliot; Screenwriter: Ben Kawaller
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