Call – Smash By Smash West

New Year, New Website, Same SmashBy

Posted on December 9, 2025 - December 30, 2025 by smashxsmashwest

As SmashXSmashWest enters its 3rd year, we’re growing into our own dedicated website space! We’ll have more materials coming soon about what to expect at this year’s festival, but for now: Save the date, SmashXSmashWest will be back from March 13-22, 2026.

You can still find materials from previous years of SmashXSmashWest over at Austin Autonomedia

Join the announcements thread, follow us on Instagram/Bluesky/Twitter/Mastodon @smashxsmashwest, and start your scheming! More details coming soon!

Screen Against the Machine: Call for Submissions to the 1st Annual SmashXFilm Festival

Posted on January 23, 2025 - December 27, 2025 by smashxsmashwest

The very idea of a “film industry” is absurd. Films are borne of human dreams and stunning feats of human coordination. Yet those who wish to financially exploit film have long sought to replace its slow, chaotic humanity with fast, predictable mechanized systems. Nowhere is this tension on more dissonant display than at SXSW, where one badge gains you admission to both demonstrations of the latest Artificial Intelligence fever dreams and to premieres of films whose writers undertook a five-month strike in 2023 to prevent studios from replacing writers with AI wholesale.

We propose a cinematic counterattack: a film festival with no judges, juries, gatekeepers, badges, wristbands, or lanyards. A film festival that blurs the line between our creative endeavors and our destructive ones and that reveals how our lights, cameras, and actions can humanize and de-mechanize the world around us. This is the 1st Annual SmashxFilm Festival!

Send us your shorts, features, docs, pilots, and video art and we will program as many as we can in familiar and surprising places in Austin, Texas during SmashXSmashWest. We welcome films of all genres and topics with a liberatory, rebellious, or critical spirit or that address our theme of “Screen Against the Machine.”

You do not need to be local to screen! We invite filmmakers from far and wide to join us, make connections, and get up for some Q&A.

You do not need to have a film to get involved! If you’d like to host a screening or partner with us on organizing, we’d love to hear from you!

Submissions close 2/24! Get in touch with us securely at: smashxfilm@proton.me

2024 Call to Divest & Disrupt

Posted on February 15, 2024 - December 27, 2025 by smashxsmashwest

We are opening a Call for Divestments & Disruptions at SmashXSmash West. If you need some inspiration, here are some friendly challenges:

To fellow travelers across the South and Southwest: meet and share knowledge, experience, and skills relevant to the challenges we are all facing: desertification and climate chaos, militant right-wing reaction, escalating repression, border militarization, trans eliminationism, and more.

To artists and the DIY scene: stop giving SXSW free advertising and start seeding antagonism to the conference. Change your “Unofficial” showcases into SmashBy showcases.

To the local activists: plan your own actions, workshops, and gatherings to boost ongoing campaigns and projects. Seize the opportunity provided by SXSW to mobilize the bold action to level up your efforts.

To the fighters: Take bold action with respect and awareness about the political context you’re entering, but don’t be restrained by anxiety. Every bold action adds to our collective courage and contributes to a culture of fierce resistance in a city that so often lacks it. SmashBy is nothing without its cutting edge.

To those dependent upon SXSW but hating it: locate your contradictory position in relation to SouthBy, find potentials in your position, and amplify them. Organize those around you to make demands of the conference or bring it to a halt. Coordinate strikes, walkouts, and pickets for the week of SXSW. Steal away resources beyond the walls of the conference, and make connections with others who want to make their escape and imagine different ways of sustaining ourselves and our passions beyond the economy.

To everyone: find the small acts of delinquency that can undermine the conference and increase your own confidence and capability. Throw up stickers & tags, steal lanyards, drag a couch into the street!