Next Saturday, I’m headed to Austin, one of my favourite cities in the US, for the 2025 SXSW Film Festival. I look forward to a wide-ranging and unique slate of documentary premieres, including films tackling birth, death and aliens. The Age of Disclosure, directed and produced by Dan Farah, has already garnered a whopping 18 million views on its trailer.
In the lead up, I spoke to directors with upcoming films about the impetus for exploring these stories and the challenges in bringing them to life. This week, I’m featuring five films by first-time directors and co-directors:
The Secret of Me directed by Grace Hughes-Hallett
The Age of Disclosure directed by Dan Farah
Remaining Native directed by Paige Bethmann
Other Side co-directed by Heather Hogan and Carter Oakley
Snow Leopard Sisters co-directed by Sonam Choekyi Lama (debut), Ben Ayers and Andrew Lynch
Stay tuned for features with directors returning to SXSW and a spotlight on documentary shorts.
If you’ll be in Austin, say howdy!
It’s 1995 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. During a feminist studies class, college student Kristi opens her textbook to discover something that turns her world upside down. What follows is the unearthing of an extraordinary and disturbing secret that goes far beyond her own life, leading to the discovery of a psychology experiment on a pair of twins – once hailed as a revolutionary success but now revealed to be a terrible lie affecting thousands around the world.
My motivations for telling this story:
I often wonder why this is the case but I am drawn to stories about psychologists playing God (I created and produced Three Identical Strangers and a documentary podcast called Dangerous Memories), so it was that part of this story that first grabbed my attention.
Like many people, I knew very little about the intersex community and its history when I started researching this documentary. It was only through many conversations with our lead contributor Jim and his fellow activists that I came to understand what a gigantic medical scandal has been and still is happening.
I personally tend to switch off if I feel like I'm watching something too 'worthy'. Creatively that's been my drive with this film – putting together such a compelling narrative that people stay for the story and finish the film understanding and empathising with something they didn't before.
Biggest challenges and achievements:
The biggest endurance test of this film was getting it funded. I started writing a pitch document in the lockdown of spring 2020, lying to myself that this would be the project that would take less than 5 years…
On a personal level, my biggest challenge was that I shot most of the film pregnant and had a baby during our edit. During our last shoot in Louisiana, I was 8 months pregnant and couldn’t put my own shoes on! Travelling and filming and travelling around the US was physically tough going and I worried at times I was being foolish doing something that intense while so pregnant.
As a team we hit very few challenges that felt like anything too big or too difficult. Of course there were many bumps along the road, as there are with most documentaries (they are unbelievably hard to make) but we all got on so well it made even the tough bits a joy.
Undoubtedly the biggest challenge for me, that ran through the whole span of production, was lying in bed at night worrying about doing a good job for the people who this film is about. I hope we have.
The Secret of Me premieres at Alamo Lamar 5 on March 9 at 11:00am
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