Feed: Updates & Reportbacks – Page 2

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

Goodbye Southby: The 1st Annual SmashXSmashWest in Review

Posted on April 10, 2024 - December 27, 2025 by smashxsmashwest

Originally published by Austin Autonomedia

Strolling down the thumping, plastered downtown streets that SXSW treat as its campus, you are likely to have a free can of “C4” shoved in your face. This energy drink named after an explosive is the perfect symbol of what the festival-conference has to offer: a cloying and too seamless blend of brand consciousness, work cultism, consumerist reverie, and militarism. The can is a bomb lobbed at you– but one you are meant to gleefully let blow you up to improve your status and efficacy within the capitalist-imperialist project.

Watching Southby’s lanyard wearing throng drink down these noxious narratives left us with a seething desire to knock the can out of their hands, to shout the truth to the heavens, to shake some sense into the world around us. And so we did.

Whether answering SmashXSmashWest’s call for Divestment and Disruption or following their own paths, autonomous crews of protesters, revolutionaries, and hooligans made their presence known downtown last week, ripping through layers of self-congratulatory spectacle to reveal the conference’s deep cynicism, moral bankruptcy, and harmful consequences within Austin and far beyond. Here are the interventions we know about.

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Reportback from 2024 SmashBy Benefit Show for Chris G. & Aeshna

Posted on March 19, 2024 - December 27, 2025 by smashxsmashwest

A flyer with vines wrapping around the edges and two butterlfies on the top corners. Text reads: "On March 16th, as part of SmashbySmashwest, an autonomous campaign to urge South by Southwest to divest from the "unity of evil" that comprises the festivals funding and implementation, community members held a show benefitting the two victims of Tarrant County's Mccarthyite crackdown on leftists. Chris G. delivered the following message to those in attendance: "I did not ask for this. It feels strange and unkind to center myself in such a way when the world is on fire. I never desired or hoped to be the center of anything in this world of so much loss and heartache greater than mine but again, I did not ask for this. I hope that you will hear my story as a message of hope in the ruins of what once was and join me in dreaming of what will be. No matter what the bastards say, they are scared. They would not have taken me if they weren't. They know the micro-chasms in their stranglehold on us are widening everyday. They shudder knowing that as long as there is breath in our lungs this blueprint of oppression as we witness it from Forth Worth to the Weelaunee to Gaza will not stand. My heart aches for my partner and for my children in this hellish limbo of uncertainty but your collective love gives me strength in ways I can't fully comprehend, much less articulate. Empathy dies quickly in this world and it is not our fault but the fault of our social conditioning that we've designed to pulse these little doses of relief as each crisis hits; even our prisoners and martyrs become beacons of idoltry we thingify and consume. I ask that as you go from here you remember our names and what we represent because it could and can be any one of your names the suits scoop next. Envelop your chosen kin in hope and carry yourself with the confidence that no matter the stumbles of the journey, the path to progress has never been more clearly defined but through our radical love for one another and because of y'all I feel that love. From the bottom of my heart, thank you." Bottom of the flyer has a QR code that says "Donate to Chris's legal fund."

Originally published by Swallowtail Distro as a reportback on this SmashXSmashWest event

On March 16th, a SmashbySmashwest benefit show was held to support Chris and Aeshna’s legal fees and approximately $400 was raised towards this goal both through online donations and in person. The following message was delivered:

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Austin Autonomedia 2024 Insurrection Challenge

Posted on March 7, 2024 - December 27, 2025 by smashxsmashwest

In honor of the coming SmashXSmashWest week of action & counter-summit, Austin Autonomedia offers this friendly challenge to those on our side. If SXSW is a time when our enemies innovate for their side of the war of social control, maybe we can challenge ourselves to innovate for our side of the social war.

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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!