SXSW 2024 was filled with fantastic screenings, from the best narrative features to stunning documentaries. While the headliners may get all the attention, over 100 films played during the 2024 SXSW Film & TV Festival in Austin, TX, and with a slate of documentaries making their debut, rounding up the best of the fest puts a spotlight on the ones we loved and those we think you should look out for.
Billy & Molly: An Otter Love Story
Get BWT in your inbox!
Get BWT in your inbox!
The National Geographic slate of documentaries for SXSW 2024 had a focus on love. With Billy & Molly: An Otter Love Story, filmmaker Charlie Hamilton James uses the unlikely family bond between a Scottish man named Billy and a wild river otter named Molly to highlight how our connections with wildlife can awaken us and the responsibility we have to protect it.
In the film, Billy finds a wild otter in desperate need of help washed up on his jetty in the remote Scottish islands of Shetland. Billy, his wife Susan, and their devoted sheepdog Jade find themselves with a unique new member of their family whom they nurse back to health with the goal of preparing her for the long winter. Over the course of the film, we learn about what family means and how the smallest of creatures can fill parts of ourselves that we didn’t know were missing. The film isn’t saying anything too grand, it is just a heart-warming story about a man and his otter. But the tenderness and empathy the film shows, and its ending focus on being stewards of the land, even if it’s against what we want, is important.
Clemente
Sports documentaries that go beyond the physical accomplishments of their subjects are highlights of the documentary genre. In Clemente, we follow Roberto Clemente, one of baseball’s most iconic figures, and the lasting impact he made for the generations of players after him.
As the first high-profile Latino player to play in Major League Baseball, Roberto’s extraordinary career opened the door for generations of Latino baseball players to come. The documentary focuses on showing the audience how Roberto Clemente lived a life of conviction and passion, leaving the world better than he found it. But don’t take our word for it, since it won the Audience Award in its category as the best of the documentaries at SXSW 2024.
Fly
Continuing a romantic theme for the National Geographic slate, Fly follows three base jumping couples: Jimmy and Marta, Espen and Amber, and Scotty and Julia. Moved by their love of base jumping (and the death-defying jumps and adrenaline rushes that come with it), the audience gets an intimate portrait of doing what you love with the person you love most. Only when the thing you love is the world’s most dangerous sport, death waits in the background.
A love story for sure, Fly’s directors, Shaul Schwarz and Christina Clusiau, don’t let the audience ever lose the stakes involved with this hobby. We hear the couples talk about the people they’ve lost to the sport and they each also acknowledge that their deaths will likely come from base jumping too. The documentary balances the need to explore and live your dream with the need to protect the person you love. The push and pull between the two and the choices the couples make to keep jumping or live a new life are equally courageous. Loving someone means wanting them to be happy and to be free, Fly captures that.
Grand Theft Hamlet
What if you were putting on a production of Hamlet, and you had to stop every five minutes to wait for your lead actors to respawn? Well, that’s Grand Theft Hamlet. In January 2021, the UK is in its 3rd lockdown and all entertainment venues remain closed. For theatre actors like Sam and Mark, it’s uncertain if the future will ever be something other than bleak. Disconnected from his professions and feeling increasingly lonely, Mark – single and childless – is carrying the weight of lockdown by himself. At the same time, Sam panics about how he is going to support his young family, who has no income. They’re both scared in their own ways and find community in Grand Theft Auto. When the duo stumbles into a theater, they suddenly have an idea to stage a full production of Hamlet within the game.
Grand Theft Hamlet is as heartwarming as it is hilarious as we watch Sam and Mark create something that means so much to them in the real world in a video game. At a time when video game communities are becoming increasingly toxic, this documentary highlights how the medium can connect us and ultimately be used to allow players to create their own art.
This is a Film About The Black Keys
This is a film about The Black Keys is an aptly named documentary. One of the best documentaries of SXSW 2024, the film traces Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney’s journey from a jamming session in a basement in Akron, Ohio, to super-stardom. I mean, how do you become one of rock’s most well-known bands when you didn’t even know your partner before you started making music?
Well, the key to The Black Keys is that after their first recordings, everything quickly fell into place as Auerbach and Carney realized they shared a powerful musical connection and a drive to keep pushing further. The film takes the audience through ten years of nonstop touring and gives the duo the space to reflect on the highs and lows of their career before and after achieveing stardom.
It’s the investigation of the difficulties of staying together for 24 years that makes This is a Film about The Black Keys so special. Exploring the fears and the tensions that have tried to push them apart helps the audience understand the bond between Auerbach and Carney and the importance of using music to express it all.
The 2024 SXSW Film & TV Festival from March 8 – 16th.
