SXSW’s inaugural London edition opens next month (2-7 June) with a diverse lineup of tech, music, and film events mounted across dozens of venues in the bustling Shoreditch area of East London.
The event’s film vertical opens on June 4 with the premiere of Amazon’s crime-comedy Deep Cover, starring Bryce Dallas Howard, Orlando Bloom, Nick Mohammed, and Sean Bean. Mike Flanagan’s Tom Hiddleston starrer The Life of Chuck has been set as the closing film. In between, the festival will deliver a robust programme of international titles like Love & Rage: Munroe Bergdorf, a documentary feature on the British trans activist, and the Eminem-produced Stan from Steve Leckart. Idris Elba, Efe Cakarel, Deepak Chopra, Katherine Ryan, Wyclef Jean, Tems, Jenn Nkiru, Jean-Michel Jarre, and Joe Wicks are also among the names set for the event.
The film programme has been curated by Anna Bogustkaya, who serves as Head of Screen at SXSW London. Perhaps best known as a genre-friendly critic and writer, Bogustkaya is also an experienced programmer. She was previously the Film and Events Programmer at the British Film Institute, where she created the popular Woman With A Movie Camera Summit. Bogustkaya has also programmed for the Edinburgh International Film Festival and Fantastic Fest. Here, Bogustkaya breaks down the process of launching a new film event, landing big-ticket titles like Deep Cover, and why she isn’t interested in competing with other UK festivals.
“I want the festival to be useful to the industry, to provide something that complements what’s already out there in London and the wider UK festival ecosystem,” Bogustkaya says.
DEADLINE: Anna, I know you as a critic and writer. How did you end running the film programme at SXSW London?
ANNA BOGUSTKAYA: I’ve been a programmer for a long time. I took a break from programming full-time to concentrate on criticism. I’ve run smaller film festivals and was programming for other film festivals for years. SXSW was always a pipe dream for me. When I heard about the festival coming to London, I knew it was the job I’d been waiting for. It’s just perfect, as a concept. The whole intersection of disciplines, creative industries, and the edge that SXSW always carries with it. It’s something that’s always connected with me.
DEADLINE: Can you tell me about building a festival from the ground up? You’ve got a great lineup. But I’m assuming a lot of your work was selling your vision to filmmakers?
BOGUSTKAYA: I took that very seriously as we started reaching out to people and building the program. It’s always a two-way street with festival programming. It’s about whether you’re the right fit for the film and the film is the right fit for the festival. That’s the ethos that we’ve applied across the board. So my approach has always been incredibly transparent with our distribution and filmmaking partners. I’ve worked at festivals before where it was a struggle building from scratch, but SXSW is incredibly well-known. So there was already some groundwork laid down for us, but then again, you have to work with the release plans of films and things like filmmaker availability. But that ethos really came on strong and was present in all our conversations with filmmaking teams. It’s all about us finding a way to work together and presenting the film in the best possible way to an audience.
DEADLINE: Who would you say is your audience?
BOGUSTKAYA: It’s a two-fold audience. On the one hand, it’s the industry. And I want the festival to be useful to the industry, to provide something that complements what’s already out there in London and the wider UK festival ecosystem. I’m not interested in competing. I’m more interested in creating something of value for the industry, and in terms of audiences, we also have the creative industries. That’s something that makes South by London unique. We have a whole section of visitors who are not necessarily film festivalgoers, but they’re engaged in the wider creative industries. So we can put films in front of them that they might not have discovered because they wouldn’t have gone to traditional film festivals. And then the other audience is the local audience. It’s Londoners. It’s people who live in East London.
DEADLINE: Yeah, there is a lot in this lineup that feels distinctly London and East London, specifically, like the Munroe Bergdorf doc.
BOGUSTKAYA: You’re right in picking out the Monroe documentary. That’s one of the films we know will speak so strongly to a UK and London audience. There are a couple of others, too. There’s an amazing documentary called London Boys, about a group of Bangladeshi bike riders who live and ride around East London. There’s another great documentary that came to us directly from the filmmakers, called Unbound, which is a community-driven doc about the erasure and the importance of queer nightlife and those club spaces and the London rave scene. We also wanted to include gems from around the world, so a big chunk of our program is not in the English language. I’m not from the UK myself, nor is my team. So we’re an international bunch.
To pick a few titles, we’re premiering an incredible South Korean thriller called Forte, which is a power play between composers. It’s stunning. There’s a documentary from an Italian filmmaker, but it’s a German film, about the fragility of a friendship between two Italian men as one of them emigrates to a different place and has a completely different sensibility about the world. We’ve really taken an international approach and tried to curate in a genre-agnostic way because it’s all about creating those pathways for audiences and industry to find the work. We’ve got an action film from Belgium. You don’t think of Belgian films when you think of action thrillers. We’ve got two different Polish horror films, which are equally amazing and completely different in how they approach the genre. We’ve really cast the net incredibly wide.
DEADLINE: You open with Deep Cover. What can you tell me about landing that film?
BOGUSTKAYA: We’re so excited to be able to premiere that and can confirm it’s really fun. It’s UK-based with UK talent. It’s got a great array of stars. Orlando Bloom is incredibly funny in it. I’m excited for people to see his performance. But also, it’s the sort of film that rarely gets platformed in this kind of centerpiece position. Like I said, I’m passionate about genre in all its forms. That also includes comedy. So, to be able to give a UK-based, starry, action-packed comedy this big centerpiece moment also speaks to that intention of our curation, because who else would do it if not South by London?
DEADLINE: What you’re saying is so interesting. Do you see your tenure at SXSW as an intervention or subversion of the traditional festival circuit?
BOGUSTKAYA: Like I said before, I’m not interested in competing. I love the UK festival scene. I’m a big fan of all the festivals that happen in the UK. I attend as many as I can. What I would like to build is something that complements them. So, whether you want to look at it as an intervention or something more subversive, I’ll let you decide. Putting on a festival is a two-way conversation. The audience completes the work we’ve done. One thing I will say we’re trying to make sure comes through the programme is that it’s accessible and not imposing.
DEADLINE: What would your advice be to someone heading down to the festival?
BOGUSTKAYA: Be curious, by which I mean try things you might not traditionally be interested in. Go and see a screening by a filmmaker you’ve never heard of before. There’s such an amazing and rich arts programme. There is a great music program. There are so many talks happening. All of it is happening around Shoreditch. If someone wanted to, they could not have an empty moment for the entire first week of June. There are so many things to discover if you just go outside of the traditional film festival framework. If you’ve got an hour to spare between screenings, don’t do meetings, go to an arts program or a gig.
The post SXSW London: Anna Bogustkaya On Curating The Inaugural Film Programme, Embracing An International Vision & Platforming Genre Filmmaking appeared first on Deadline.
