With South By Southwest in full swing we have a great look at what movies will be released this year after festival season. This time we’re looking at Obscure Pictures and what they have to offer. Check out the titles that they are releasing at SXSW this year.
7 KEYS
When her date lets her down, Lena meets Daniel and there’s an instant connection, especially when she learns that he’s kept the keys to all the places he’s ever lived. Lena doesn’t want to go home. She wants to use Daniel’s keys to go on the ultimate property porn tour of London, a lost weekend of getting to know each other intimately in other people’s homes. But what begins as a risky fantasy soon becomes a deadly threat. From tiny apartments to riverside penthouses, “7 Keys” is a wild ride through the hidden side of London, the dark underbelly of a modern city where young people struggle to find their place – and sometimes struggle to survive.
FAMILY
11-year-old Johanna’s world is falling apart. She’s just moved across the country for her father Harry’s medical treatment, and as her father declines and her mother Naomi is consumed with caring for him, Johanna feels horribly alone. In desperation, she makes a call out into the universe for a good spirit to save her family. But as the long summer days wear on, and a series of increasingly disturbing events rips through her home, she begins to fear that something else has come instead — a terrifying presence from some dark corner of the universe that has latched on to her family and is now eating them from the inside.
KISS/CRASH
The installation triptych “Kiss/Crash” employs AI-imagery to explore themes of desire and the expanding gap between real experience and artificial representations in the digital age. The interactive experience consists of three related works that use AI to augment, subvert, and negate the iconic image of the Hollywood kiss.
Using a queer lens to appropriate a classic Hollywood aesthetic, the work places AI within the history of image-production technologies meant to incite and homogenize our desires. In the process, it reveals the nature of AI imagery and hints at how our most intimate desires will continue to be stretched and shaped by artificial representations at an accelerating pace.
KNEECAP
When fate brings Belfast schoolteacher JJ into the orbit of self-confessed ‘low life scum’ Naoise & Liam Og, the needle drops on a hip hop act like no other.
Rapping in their native Irish language, KNEECAP fast become the unlikely figureheads of a Civil Rights movement to save their mother tongue.
But the trio must first overcome police, paramilitaries & politicians trying to silence their defiant sound – whilst their anarchic approach to life often makes them their own worst enemies.
In this fiercely original sex, drugs and hip hop biopic KNEECAP play themselves, laying down a global rallying cry for the defence of native cultures.
LOVE MACHINA
LOVE MACHINA follows the stranger-than-fiction love story of Martine and Bina Rothblatt, futurists who believe through technology we can build a better future for humanity. In 2007 they commissioned Bina48, an “AI Mindfile” housed in a robotic bust based on Bina Rothblatt herself, as part of a multi-pronged attempt to ensure their love lasts forever. The Rothblatts are pioneers in satellite communications, organ transplantation, electric aviation and cryogenics. The documentary explores Martine and Bina’s optimistic vision that there’s a point in the future where digital consciousness, space settlement and these different technologies will converge to radically change life as we know it.
OMAR AND CEDRIC: IF THIS EVER GETS WEIRD
Zoya Lowe, a 55 year old woman from Miami, FL, has been diagnosed with a black hole inside her chest and given a week to live. But what the doctors and her family don’t know is that she has already lived this week before. She’s lived it so many times, in fact, that she doesn’t even know how long it’s been. Until one day she meets Paula, a young woman studying time at a lab in the local university, and together they decide to try and solve time travel so Zoya can actually go back— back into her past, back to a time before she settled, back to when her whole future was still wide open in front of her—back so she can do it all over again, and finally be the person she always wanted to be.
SWAMP DOGG GETS HIS POOL PAINTED
Hidden away, deep in the suburbs of Los Angeles, legendary cult musician Swamp Dogg, alongside housemates Moogstar and Guitar Shorty, have transformed their home into an artistic playground. Together, they navigate the tumultuous music industry, forging a unique and inspiring bond across time and space.
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO ALLEE WILLIS
Take one look at award-winning songwriter / artist Allee Willis and you see someone unafraid to be themselves. Dressed in a cacophony of prints and colors, her signature asymmetrical haircut and famed parties at her real-life PeeWee’s Playhouse, Allee didn’t waste any opportunity to tell you what she was about. But privately, Allee struggled with not fitting established gender and sexual norms.
She buried herself in her work, until true love manifested her ultimate masterpiece – self-acceptance.
Allee began filming her life in 1950s Detroit and never stopped. This film is the realization of her wish that her “final art piece be someone putting together the trail I have left behind.”