What to watch for at the Lake Travis Film Festival

The third annual Lake Travis Film Festival is set for this month, and once again it will showcase short films, documentaries and feature-length productions for those in the area and in the industry to enjoy.

The event will take place Sept. 15-18, with the first two days taking place in Lakeway, the third day in Bee Cave and the last day in Star Hill Ranch, with 90 film projects being shown — over 40 hours worth of movies — in different indoor and outdoor venues. Those interested in going can buy a four-day festival badge that includes all of the screenings, after-parties, the awards brunch and more for $225. Daily wristbands also are available

“We're not trying to compete with the big guys,” said Kat Albert, the festival's executive director. “We're never going to be like Alliance Française French Film Festival or South by Southwest. We don't want to be like them. We just want to get the best quality films we can possibly get. We want to treat our filmmakers and our screenwriters like rock stars and we want to invite them in to meet our local community.”

Albert said the film festival will kick off with a screenwriting masterclass workshop with Owen Egerton, an award-winning novelist and filmmaker and a founder of Alamo Drafthouse’s long-running comedy show, "Master Pancake Theater," at High 5 Entertainment in Lakeway from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

“(The workshop) is open to anybody,” Albert said. “If you’re an experienced writer and want to learn more, you’re going to get something out of it. If you’re somebody that’s like, ‘Oh my God, I had this idea one time!’ that’s OK, too, come in and learn if you can write a screenplay.”

Albert said this year’s catalog has a heavy focus on music. One music-focused film she highlighted was the documentary, "The Birth & History of Western Swing," a type of American dance that started in Fort Worth, and its evolution throughout historical events like the Great Depression. The documentary will be shown on Sept. 17 at Goga Yoga at the Hill Country Galleria in Bee Cave from 5 to 6:30 p.m.

Nonmusical documentaries include “Exit” by Alison Jayne Wilson, one of 13 foreign films that will be shown at the festival, which is about three women who are victims of human trafficking in Spain, the damage it causes and the extreme difficulties faced by the women trying to recover.

“The three women in my film, Vanessa, Hope and Alika … are at various stages of their recovery, from different parts of the world and different ages,” Wilson said. “The commonality is that they were all lied to and were identified as victims of trafficking. I know they work very hard every day to survive, to think clearly, and have had to work very hard to retain any form of self-esteem or self-love due to their exploitation.”

Wilson’s documentary will play on from 7:30 to 9 p.m. on Sept. 16 at the Contracommon in the Galleria. The documentary will also release in September in both Spanish and English.

“I am honored that the Lake Travis Film Festival has added 'Exit' to their programming and given it the evening slot,” Wilson said. “Documentaries can illuminate social injustices and spark change or they can be just another form of entertainment. I prefer the former. There seems to be a lot of spectacle around films on human trafficking, a lot of myths, girls kidnapped in white vans, etc. People should walk away with a better understanding of human trafficking and potentially help to identify victims of this heinous crime.”

Another foreign screening that Albert highlighted was “Brother Troll” by Gudmund Helmsdal, his first feature short film about two brothers in the Faroe Islands struggling to save the family farm and their relationship after the sudden loss of their older brother. The film, inspired by true events, has won over 90 awards throughout different festivals across the world.

“Some years ago I heard a story about one of these (Faroe Islands) villages where if somebody died and they didn’t have a cemetery, you had to carry the bodies over the mountains to be buried in the next village,” Helmsdal said. “The inspiration is that. If somebody died, you had to walk these crazy routes, and there are a lot of stories that happened during these walks over the mountain."

The short film will play from 5-6:45 p.m. on Sept. 16 at the La Quinta Inn & Suitesin Lakeway.

Of the 90 filmsat the festival, 50 are from Austin-area artists. Isabelle Farrell, a 23-year-old from Austin, will show her debut feature film “Route One North” — a coming-of-age road trip comedy following two sisters who set off to find their long-absent father after their mother refuses to give 16-year-old Bee permission to marry her military boyfriend. The film will be shown on the last day of the festival atBee Cave's Star Hill Ranch in building B from 5:15 to 6:30 p.m. The session will include a Q&A after the screening.

“I feel like I learned so much (working on this film),” Farrell said. “What I’m most proud of is the difference from way early to the edits to the very end of the edits. Seeing how it transformed from the start to the finish from a rough assembly to an actual movie.”

Albert said she hopes people and film lovers will enjoy the festival and see the cultural values and the community of the Lake Travis area.

“There's not a lot of cultural things to do,” Albert said. “But there are a lot of filmmakers that live out here, and so we just started this because we really wanted to address the lack of cultural things to do in the area.”

For more information on the festival, visit laketravisfilmfestival.com.

This article has been updated to correct the name of Alison Jayne Wilson.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: What to watch for at the Lake Travis Film Festival