Film Screenings

Photo by Anna Spysz

SXSWedu will feature a number of education-related film screenings, during the Conference & Festival, March 4-7, 2013 in Austin, Texas. This exciting new component champions the entertainment media tackling some of today's key education topics.

The screenings will take place at the historic Alamo Drafthouse in the heart of Austin's 6th Street, just a short walk from the Austin Convention Center. The theater boasts a full menu including appetizers, pizzas, sandwiches, and a full service bar to ensure that your experience will be a great one.

*Use your SXSWedu badge to obtain your free admission ticket at the Alamo Drafthouse prior to each screening. Seating is subject to capacity and will occur 30 minutes before the screening starts.

Stay tuned after the screening for a Q&A with film directors, producers and writers! Learn more about the 2013 eduFILM screenings and 'star' your favorites in the online schedule.

Brooklyn Castle

Director: Katie Dellamaggiore, Executive Producers: Geoff Gibson, Robert Mclellan, Julie Parker Benello, Wendy Ettinger, Judith Helfand

Brooklyn Castle is a documentary about I.S. 318 - an inner-city school where more than 65 percent of students are from homes with incomes below the federal poverty level - that also happens to have the best, most winning junior high school chess team in the country. Chess has transformed the school from one cited in 2003 as a "school in need of improvement" to one of New York City's best. But a series of recession-driven pubic school budget cuts now threaten to undermine those hard-won successes.

Watch the Trailer

Building Hope

Writer/Director: Turk Pipkin, Executive Producer: Christy Pipkin, Producer: Matt Naylor

After rebuilding a rural Kenyan primary school, Turk Pipkin and The Nobelity Project agree to help build the area’s first high school - including the award-winning RainWater Court, classroom building, science and computer labs, and a library. Through drought, flood, and fundraising challenges, Building Hope chronicles the construction of Mahiga Hope High, and the connection between a thousand people in the U.S. and an African community working to create a better future for their children.

An inspiring story of those who believe education shouldn’t end after the 8th grade; and a call to action that the time for Universal Primary and Universal Secondary education has arrived.

Watch the Trailer

Bully

Director: Lee Hirsch, Producers: Lee Hirsch and Cynthia Lowen

BULLY is a beautifully cinematic, character-driven documentary. At its heart are those with huge stakes in this issue whose stories each represent a different facet of America’s bullying crisis. Filmed over the course of the 2009/2010 school year, BULLY opens a window onto the pained and often endangered lives of bullied kids, revealing a problem that transcends geographic, racial, ethnic and economic borders. It documents the responses of teachers and administrators to aggressive behaviors that defy “kids will be kids” clichés, and it captures a growing movement among parents and youths to change how bullying is handled in schools, in communities and in society as a whole.

Watch the Trailer

Great Expectations: Raising Educational Achievement

Director/Producer: Jonathan Robinson, Supervising Producer & Writer: Dana Rae Warren

Public school systems in the United States are at a crossroads. In Connecticut, students overall score among the top in national math and reading tests, but low-income students perform at dramatically lower levels, creating an achievement gap which is the widest of any state in the nation. The film Great Expectations takes us into schools where visionaries are creating successful models for educational systems that raise achievement for students of all income levels. These leaders understand the importance of high-quality early childhood education programs, of having highly-effective teachers in every classroom, and of implementing innovative policies to turnaround low performing schools. Great Expectations demonstrates that closing the achievement gap is critical not only for the lives of individual students and their families, but for the future of this country. Great Expectations was commissioned by the Connecticut Council for Education Reform to exemplify the challenge the organization was created to address and some of the potential solutions to the problem.

Watch the Trailer

Great Expectations: Raising Educational Achievement | 3 Promos from Build Pictures on Vimeo.

Look! I'm Learning

Director: Allyson Rockwell, Producers: Allyson Rockwell and Bruce Umpstead

This film captures four amazing stories of how technology designed for learning is transforming public education in the early grades. We added locations in greater Chicago and Detroit to that of small, hometown Ludington, Michigan, making the message much a broader, and compelling. The film captures the beginning of a movement, a revolution, led by teachers and their students. It is a new way of teaching and learning where every student receives personalized, individualized instruction at the earliest grades!

Watch the Trailer

Look, I'm Learning from Allyson Rockwell on Vimeo.

SXSW Texas High School Shorts

A preview of the next filmmaking generation, as Texas High Schoolers present shorts of 5 minutes or less.

To support and cultivate the next generation of filmmakers, the SXSW® Film Conference and Festival (SXSW Film) presents a special film competition for students enrolled in Texas high schools each year.

The New Public

Director/Producer: Jyllian Gunther, Producers: Essie Chambers, Lesley Goldman, Alan Oxman, Dr. Carla Solomon, Executive Producers: Jack Lechner, Josh Braun, Andrea Miller, Anthos Media LLC

Can a team of ambitious educators, who create a small, public high school from scratch, solve the problems of urban education? There is no simple answer, rather, our film, the New Public illustrates just how complex the problems are. With unprecedented access in and out of the classroom over 4 years, the film follows a teacher struggling to connect to his students, a young man with a secret, a mother who won’t back down, and a young woman who needs the school’s fresh start to be her own. This dynamic community of educators, parents and students goes all out to confront interconnecting issues of race, class, and economic reality, yet the results are bittersweet. Verité footage combined with community-shot material provides an intimate and holistic look inside one urban public school - but their story provides an invaluable guide through the complexities faced by urban public schools and communities everywhere. The New Public explores issues of class, race and culture in the contemporary battlefield of urban education. It’s a case study and a detailed map for the road ahead.