Back in January, your intrepid Culture Vulture correspondent previewed the multi-genre 2026 South by Southwest film lineup — and then, as a result of various real world comedies and dramas, was rendered incapable of viewing any of the festival’s cinematic offerings with the exception of four shorts.
By a lucky coincidence, however, TWO of those movies wound up as juried prize winners: Renée Marie Petropoulos’s Best Narrative Short “Souvenir” and “Eructation,” directed by Victoria Trow, a documentary that claimed the Special Jury Award
The former plays like a parallel universe version of the tense, mercurial relationship between the Brittany O’Grady and Sydney Sweeney characters on the first season of White Lotus if they’d been played by Tanzyn Crawford and Emily Grant as lovers rather than frenemies. And I’d assumed the charming, funny “Eructation” was a mockumentary rather than an actual doc given that Trow’s subject is a woman training (for reals, as it turns out) to break the world record for belching as loudly as possible.
Other shorts included a pair of funeral tales set in rural Taiwan (“Dua Ji”, directed by YuHan Tsai) and New York City (“Them That’s Not”, by HBO Director’s Fellow Mekhai Lee), both anchored by strong performances (Kuei-Mei Yang and Angel Theory, respectively, as grieving daughters) in self-contained, well-observed dramas that seem lived-in enough to suggest what full-length versions featuring the fictional families might feel like.
As for the rest of SXSW’s awards slate, Graham Parkes’s supernatural romance Wishful Thinking scored the Narrative Feature prize while director Ayden Mayeri earned the Documentary Feature honors with a chronicle of unlikely pop stardom (Summer 2000: The X-Cetra Story). Meanwhile, Alex Bendo’s minor league steroid saga In My Blood won the Independent TV Pilot Competition and SXSW announced March 7–15 as the dates for the 2027 festival.
