South by Southwest, Austin’s premiere film festival and conference that, in some ways, has eclipsed Sundance as the place to see a lot of the upcoming independent features and go to workshops/seminars with a lot of the movers and shakers in entertainment media, made a couple of announcements today about films that will premiere at this year’s event, scheduled for March 7-15.
The biggest announcement was that the festival will hold the world premiere of Rob Thomas’ Veronica Mars movie, which was the subject of much-publicized Kickstarter campaign from last year (they raised their funds in ten hours, one of the fastest ever for the website). The film will have a limited release on March 14. If you haven’t caught up with the series and have Amazon Prime, you’re in luck, since Amazon also announced today that they will start streaming all 64 episodes of the series on Thursday and retain exclusive rights to it for the immediate future.
The other big announcement was that Jon Favreau’s Chef, a film where Favreau plays a Los Angeles chef who quits his job, moves to Miami and starts a food truck that he takes on the road (presumably for a touching road trip comedy), will open the festival. The film also stars Dustin Hoffman, Sofia Vergara and John Leguizamo, and will open for general audiences in May.
Other premieres will include documentaries about zombie culture and Swedish House Mafia, a new thriller from Mark Duplass, and a conversation with Alejandro Jodorowsky, who may or may not be premiering his new film.
The complete schedule will be released on January 30th. Tickets to attend range from $600-1600 and gradually go up as the festival approaches, so raid your piggy banks and savings and get in while you can.
Source: TheHollywood Reporter
