Film lovers and the communities they create online will be celebrated in a Seattle International Film Festival event featuring Letterboxd’s Editor-in-Chief Gemma Gracewood, alongside Lilly Riber of MUBI and Lela Meadow-Conner of the Film Festival Alliance.

From properly good Covid comedies to an epic folk-horror doc and an Indigenous feminist Western, the Letterboxd Festiville team reveals their ten best of SXSW Online.

As Swan Song premieres at SXSW, Letterboxd’s queer correspondent Leo Koziol talks to acting icon Udo Kier and filmmaker Todd Stephens about the communal energy of non-Hollywood film sets, camptastic needle drops, and making movie magic with soap queen Linda Evans.

Ahead of The Spine of Night’s premiere as a SXSW Film Midnighter, Letterboxd’s animation correspondent Kambole Campbell caught up with directors Morgan Galen King and Philip Gelatt for a lengthy chat about rotoscoping, “mac’n’cheese” comfort films, cult 80s movie Heavy Metal, and “fuckin’ Akira”. 

A healthy sense of the absurd runs through a trio of SXSW 2021 Covid-era films. Gemma Gracewood and Selome Hailu report on the comedies that capture the barminess of quarantine, pathetic stimulus checks, and our reliance on cats for happiness. Featuring (pictured above from left to right): Puss, Learning Tagalog with Kayla and I’m Fine (Thanks for Asking).

Writer, film programmer and horror scholar Kier-La Janisse at last steps behind the camera with Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror, after being the subject of a documentary (2004’s Celluloid Horror) and producing many others (including last year’s portmanteau horror doc Tales of the Uncanny, directed by her Severin Films colleague David Gregory). 

Céline Sciamma does it again, a demented, anthropological A-to-Z of Romanian pornography takes the Golden Bear, and Indigenous sci-fi breaks new ground as Letterboxd’s Festiville team awards its Berlinale bouquets for 2021.

Selome Hailu speaks to Janet Pierson, director of the South by Southwest film festival, about getting married at a movie theater, how Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It changed her life, and what makes a good Covid movie.