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Austin-based directors Nathan and David Zellner's dark fable, "Kid-Thing," screens at South By Southwest after playing the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. In the film, young Annie (Sydney Aguirre) roams the countryside of East Texas aimlessly, casually shoplifting, throwing objects at passing cars, and enjoying her freedom, while her father lays about on the couch.

Following their acclaimed documentary "45635," Bill and Turner Ross headed south to New Orleans, filming the city almost exclusively at night. "Tchoupitoulas" follows three brothers as they experience what Turner Ross calls a "surreal Pleasure Island."

“Tchoupitoulas” is unique in its depiction of the Crescent City. The joyousness and weariness of downtown New Orleans is presented with equal measure. “These aren’t issue-based films,” Turner Ross explains. “It’s portraiture, really, and experience.” 

In "Heimkommen (Coming Home)," a young girl and her brother both deal with the loss of a loved one in very different ways. The film was shot in Germany, where director Micah Magee has been based for the past ten years.

Senior Maqui Gaona is enrolled in the Digital Video program at St. Mary’s Hall. Her film “Burn Spark” will screen as part of the Texas High School Shorts program at SXSW this week.  The short film is set in a world where people are programmed to fall in love with only one other person.

“I kind of got the idea from lots of different interpretations of what it means to instantly connect with someone,” she says. 

Probably my favorite movie I’ve seen so far this year, “The Tree of Life” approaches for me a kind of magical or spiritual experience. It was recently released on Blu-ray/DVD.

The histories of San Antonio, and those of Texas, are illuminated in stories contained in legal documents of county courthouses around the state. 

Bexar County Clerk Gerry Rickhoff is working to preserve aging, fragile documents found in the Bexar County Courthouse, and to retrieve about 70,000 documents dating back to 1717, which were given to the University of Texas by a Bexar County Commissioners Court over 100 years ago. 

“In all these books, I wanted the children to solve their problems, to not have to run to an adult or authority figure to solve them.” 

In the late 1930s, still fresh off the success of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” Walt Disney came across a story by the English writer P.L. Travers about a magical nanny that visits the Banks family — young Jane, Michael, and baby twins John and Barbara. Disney became fascinated with the stories, and felt they’d make an ideal setting for a motion picture. He pursued Travers for some 20 years until she finally relented and allowed Disney to adapt her books.