The Scout is not really about the mechanics of location scouting, even though it pays close attention to them. It is about what that job reveals. Sofia is always entering spaces, but rarely belonging to them. She is welcomed in, sort of, but only for a purpose. She is expected to observe, photograph, assess, negotiate, and move on. She is intimately present and fundamentally temporary.
The day before our interview, my partner asked me the most normal question in the world: "What is this one about?" I had an answer, sort of, but not a clean one. There is the surface-level premise that you can find on the internet, of course. A sexually frustrated hammer salesman named Carroll steps on a rusty nail and begins moving through an increasingly warped physical and psychological spiral. The world around him seems to decay as quickly as his body does. Ultimately, though, the film is difficult to pin down in any meaningful way.
On the surface, the obvious talking point is Charli xcx. Of course it is. She has become a household name in a way that few artists do, and Erupcja was shot during the strange cultural detonation of Brat summer. But the more interesting question is not simply how Pete Ohs ended up making a movie with Charli xcx. It is why someone like Charli would be drawn to this kind of low-budget, independent film in the first place.
Now in its 23rd year, the Calgary Underground Film Festival has long since outgrown any “local hidden gem” label. CUFF has become one of the most exciting genre festivals in Canada, and the kind of festival that keeps proving why programmers still matter.
Top 5 Films from SXSW 2026 The SXSW Film & TV Festival remains one of the more exciting early checkpoints in the film year because it brings together so many…
A Safe Distance had its world premiere at the 2026 SXSW Film & TV Festival on Thursday, March 12, and it is a film that naturally invites conversation. Directed by Gloria Mercer, the Canadian feature follows Alex, a woman abandoned in the forest by her boyfriend, who soon finds herself pulled into the orbit of a fugitive couple living off the grid.
There is something fitting about seeing Joe Swanberg back at SXSW with a full-length feature. For a certain generation of American independent film, Swanberg was one of the defining architects of a loose, intimate, improvisation-driven style that would eventually get folded into the ever-clumsy label of mumblecore.
I Love Boosters opened the 2026 SXSW Film & TV Festival with its world premiere at the Paramount Theatre, and it felt exactly like the kind of film you would want to launch a festival with: loud, unruly, politically charged, funny, abrasive, beautifully designed, and impossible to confuse with anyone else’s work.
Certain films are built for a packed theatre, and Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is absolutely one of them. I caught the film at its SXSW premiere at the Paramount Theatre, where it played as a Headliner screening, and it felt like one of the marquee crowd events of the festival.
My introduction to Emma Donoghue’s screenwriting was a memorable one: watching Room in a confined space—in my case, the middle seat of an aircraft—and realizing mid-flight that it would be an uphill battle to not let out an ugly cry surrounded by strangers.