SXSW 2011

Fly Away, opens on Jeanne, a single mother, as she is awoken by her teenage daughter’s cries. "Bad girl! I hate myself!" It might not be a surprising sentiment for a teenager in the throes of an angst-ridden moment, but Mandy is severe on the spectrum of autism, and the middle of the night is one of the times she communicates the clearest. Written and directed by Janet Grillo, Fly Away is a slice of life portrait of a small family at a crossroads and it focuses very much on the everyday details.

One of the most interesting panels I went to at SXSW was E-Race: Avatars, Anonymity, and Visualization of Identity on the Internet. It included Lisa Nakamura, Director of Asian-American Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign and author of Digitizing Race; James Au, who literally wrote the book on the avatar universe of Second Life; and Jeff Yang, who writes the column Asian Pop for the San Francisco Chronicle. I heard about generational divides in avatar usage and anecdotes about role-playing games that I don't know much about to begin with, but when Lisa Nakamura took the mic, the conversation really began.

My take on the Felicia Day and Christopher "moot" Poole keynotes at SXSW 2011.