When it was announced that the South By Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival would be going virtual in 2021 due to COVID-19 concerns, thousands of filmmakers and cinema enthusiasts from across the globe were left to dreamily reminisce over the days when attending the much-anticipated mid-March showcase of cinema from diverse genres bathed in the majestic, soft white light of big screens among passionate spellbound crowds was still possible. Instead, they would sit alone on their couches or chairs staring at computer monitors, with the audience’s laughter, stunned gasps and rapturous ovations replaced with a pittance of congratulatory messages in a chat box in the bottom right corner of the screen. Despite this change in format, the festival, headlined by “Demi Lovato: Dancing with the Devil,” “Alone Together,” and “Tom Petty: Somewhere You Feel Free,” occurred as planned from March 16-18 and included streamed online screenings of new films by young and seasoned filmmakers alike. 

Senior Gaelila McKaughan’s short film, “In Time,” was featured in the Texas High School Shorts section of the festival. McKaughan said her film, which documents parts of her daily routine during COVID-19-imposed quarantine, portrays the introspection and struggle with self-acceptance she faced while isolated from the distractions of the outside world.

“I just had cameras around while I was doing things in my house, and it’s very much just documenting how I was living in quarantine,” McKaughan said. “I think that for me, and for a lot of people, people have kind of felt themselves being unwound in quarantine because they feel like they’re stuck inside, or they’re also stuck having to deal with themselves. There’s no distractions through routine, you have to create your own routine, but past that, you have to face yourself.”

In tune with the topic of her film, McKaughan said her biggest challenge in creating “In Time” was motivation and the development of a routine. She said paying less attention to the script and forcing herself to begin the filming and editing process was crucial to her completion of the short.

“I like to take more of an assistant type role, so actually motivating myself to create an original idea, and then put in the work to convey that idea was a lot for me,” McKaughan said. “It was like the only way I can motivate myself was not even thinking about the script anymore. And just putting the camera in totally different spots in my house and going through my routine. And just say, ‘Okay, I’m just gonna figure it out and edit it.’ I guess, you could say, it’s part of the message of the film, too. But that was a real challenge for me, like a self-motivated project. But it’s also something that I’m really proud to be able to accomplish.”

McKaughan stressed the importance of practice when first starting off as a filmmaker. In addition, she said developing a support structure and deriving motivation from working from others are key to success in filmmaking.

“You just gotta do it,” McKaughan said. “When you’re first starting out, you don’t know what your process is, you don’t know what you’re good at. And it also takes you more time to work on things because you don’t really have the experience, and trying to figure out how to convey what you’re feeling…Another thing too, is…I think that, if anything, finding somebody to collaborate with, whether that’s a mentor who keeps you on track or a friend to look over your stuff or working in a crew with somebody; I think film is inherently teamwork.”

Much like “In Time,” the Polaris Banks-directed short film “Reklaw,” which premiered in the festival’s Midnight Shorts screening section, explores topics relevant to the issues of the present day, taking place in a world where the corruption of the criminal justice system is taken for granted. The movie follows a team of vigilantes who have decided that because of the damaging effects of the prison system on inmates, preventing people from being incarcerated by disposing of evidence of crimes would benefit society. 

Banks said he hoped to spark thought among his audience about the importance of compassion in criminal rehabilitation.

“The motivation for this is that the leader of the team believes forgiving people is really the way to rehabilitate them, and punishment without love behind it doesn’t work, and it just makes people angry and feel rejected by society,” Banks said. “And so I want them to think about the justice system, human nature, how forgiveness and unconditional love actually has more of a potential to rehabilitate people or help society than punishment. So I just want them to think about that. And, usually, that does come across where a lot of people are like, ‘It has so many philosophical ideas that are wrapped up in this little action movie.'”

Banks said that his primary focus with ”Reklaw” was achieving all of his lifetime goals as a filmmaker. The result of this was a short film containing components normally found in feature films, including a set he built himself.

“For me, I wanted to make a movie that accomplished all my dreams as a filmmaker in 12 minutes, somehow, if I knew I was going to get hit by a bus at this time of the year, that I could die happy,” Banks said. “I want it to have multiple locations and multiple characters, and bigger themes and complicated relationships, a lot of stuff you do not put in a short, that’s for features. And so I kind of made a little mini-feature. And the set-building was an incredible undertaking, where I built this big, like, basically a house, and I couldn’t afford to hire a crew to help me. So instead, I just supplemented it with time, and I spent six months, mostly by myself, framing out this big set.”

To Banks, despite the inability to interact with others in person at this year’s SXSW, the virtual format enhanced the social aspect of the film festival. According to Banks, conferencing over Zoom gave him the opportunity to speak with others in the industry without having to physically approach or find them. 

“It seems like it’s not going to be any fun because you’re at a festival in person, usually, and there’s always mingling, and everything’s legit,” Banks said. “But the social aspect has surprisingly been nice. Instead of having to approach people at a screening or an event and have to just kind of coldly walk up and start a conversation, they put us all in Zoom groups, and that takes away the icebreaker where I need to interject into somebody else’s little circle of conversation to mingle. Instead, we’re all just put in these breakout rooms, and there’s eight of us, 10 of us in there, and we didn’t decide; it’s just kind of like, ‘There you are.'”

In addition to allowing more seamless peer-to-peer interaction, this year’s virtual film festival was unique in that it allowed attendees to view content at their convenience, according to Stephen Saito, a writer for the film criticism website Moveable Fest. Saito said the discovery of new films that this lack of structure allowed mirrored the experience of previous, in-person years.

“Most years at SXSW, you often will find yourself wandering into a movie that you have no idea what you’re seeing, and you’re going through it because you have some free time between other movies that you may not have expected,” Saito said. “So it does sort of imitate that in that way that it sort of pushes you to get out of what you thought you were going to see and maybe watch something that you hadn’t necessarily put on your schedule, but it’s available, and you can check it out at a certain time. So it sort of imitated the experience in that regard.”

Out of all the films he saw during the festival, Saito said the narrative “Our Father” stood out to him the most. However, he also gave a nod to the pandemic comedy film “The End of Us.”

“There’s a movie called ‘Our Father’ that’s in the Narrative [Feature] Competition that I really, really enjoyed,” Saito said. “It’s about a pair of sisters that find out that they have an uncle they didn’t know about. And it’s a really, really wonderful comedy. There’s another one that actually is a pandemic movie, it’s called ‘The End of Us,’ that I was concerned about, because I thought, ‘The last thing I want to see right now is a movie about last year,’ but it’s a lot of fun. It’s about two people that break up right before the pandemic starts and have to live together throughout it.”

Saito served as a juror for SXSW’s Louis Black “Lone Star” Award and said the competing films spanned diverse genres and topics. Saito also appreciated the overall similarity between this year’s festival and past festivals despite the change in format.

“My category really has such a wide net,” Saito said. “There wasn’t any kind of focus. We had a coming-of-age comedy, ‘Inbetween Girl,’ that’s made by a UT alum. That was wonderful. That actually was the only narrative film in the films that we were judging, the movie ‘Kid Candidate’ was part of that selection, ‘United States vs. Reality Winner’ about the whistle-blower, these were movies that were all over the place. But SXSW, generally, I have to say, this seems like a traditional year not pertaining to that category. Actually, what I should say about ‘Kid Candidate,’ what got me excited about that movie is that it felt like a movie that could have played SXSW 20 years ago. And I think that the festival, in general, has stayed true to the spirit of what it’s doing even in this online incarnation.”