By Travis Johnson

Two Australian feature films will have their world premieres at the 2018 South by Southwest Festival, which takes place in Austin, Texas, from March 9 – 18. They’ll be joining an impressive array of other Australian screen art at the event.

Upgrade, previously known as STEM, will be joining the Midnighters program. Written and directed by Leigh Whannell (Saw, Insidious) Leigh Whannell, the film is set in a utopian near future where technology controls everything. A technophobe, Grey Trace (Logan Marshall-Green) avenges his wife’s murder and his own paralysis-causing injury with the help of an experimental computer chip implant – STEM – that turns out to have a mind of its own.

Screening in the Narrative Spotlight is Brothers’ Nest from director Clayton Jacobson and screenwriter Jaime Browne. With their mother dying of cancer, intent on changing her will to benefit her “new” husband before she dies, two brothers go to extreme and deadly lengths to protect their inheritance from being signed away before it’s too late. Shane Jacobson, Clayton Jacobson, Lynette Curran, Kim Gyngell, and Sarah Snook star in the  tragicomedy.

Tangles and Knots by Renée Marie Petropoulos is screening in the Narrative Shorts program, while Asian Girls from writer and director Hyun Lee is in the genre-focused Midnight Shorts stream. Meanwhile, the video for Amanda Palmer & Edward Ka-Spel’s ‘The Clock At The Back Of The Cage’, directed by Chris Bennett, Christy Flaws, and Luke O’Connor, will also screen.

A number of Australian works are featured in the Virtual Cinema Program, including Awake: Episode One, Four Worlds, Parragirls Past, Present – unlocking institutional memories of ‘care’, and RONE, while the TEDx Sydney titles are featured in the Excellence In Title Design showcase.

For full info, shoot over to the SXSW site.

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