SXSW Film 2016 Honors the Past While Facing an Exciting, Gaudy and Uncertain Future

The night before the SXSW Film Festival got under way, Michael Barker, co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, defended his communal love of film in theaters. "In pursuing the new future, we cannot decimate the past," he said in his acceptance speech as one of the honorees at the Texas Film Awards, the annual benefit for Richard Linklater's now 30-year-old Austin Film Society.  

Watching the Sony Classics reel, the crucial art films I grew up on over the decades sped past. From Truffaut's "The 400 Blows" and Merchant/Ivory's "Howard's End" to more recent Oscar-winners "Blue Jasmine," "Alice" and "Son of Saul," I felt a twinge of loss. SXSW is all about change, and forward motion. But in our rush toward digital immediacy, we lose something too.  

While Barker and partner Tom Bernard's Sony Classics remains the very model of a theatrically driven, studio specialty subsidiary,...