Dateline AUSTIN, Texas: “THEY DON’T WANT OUR PITY. THEY WANT OUR RESPECT!” That was the message from uber-chef José Andrés, famous already for feeding people in successful restaurants and on TV shows, but now elevated to the status of global humanitarian hero-figure.   

Andrés was taking about his countless beneficiaries across the world. His rapid-reaction World Central Kitchen has for 13 years been setting up feeding stations for the hungry in crisis-ridden countries, repeatedly responding to emergencies as various as the recent Turkey-Syria earthquake and the ongoing war in Ukraine.

Chef Andrés joined the flocks of established and would-be influencers and advocates who descend on this city’s South By South West Conference and Festivals, the huge single entity that braids together the worlds of film, music, digital tech and media, education and more. The annual March get-together was inevitably badly dented by Covid, but it’s now back fully into its post-pandemic stride.

For a session named “The Stories We Tell Can Change the World” (wording aimed, I suspect, at the media critic in all of us), Andrés was interviewed on stage by Washington Post columnist and longtime NPR network news host Michele Norris, the first ever black woman to fill that role. Norris is no slouch herself when it comes to social action; she founded The Race Card Project, a dialogue-provoking online forum aimed at combating racism. It’s some measure of the audience drawn into SXSW (pronounced simply ‘South By’ by its habitués) that the Andrés/Norris conversation generated two standing ovations in a vast space seating 2,500 listeners.

The two are very evidently good friends (see pic above left) and their message was the clarion call that often comes from tighter, nimbler organizations, like WCK, firmly distinguishing themselves from huge, and frankly often staid international behemoths like the UN’s World Food Programme and the Food and Agriculture Organization. [Full disclosure: I have worked with both those UN divisions at various times.] Jumping off from the striking achievement that WCK has already provided 3.5 million meals for quake-battered communities in Turkey and Syria, Andrés said:

“Big problems sometimes have very simple solutions. What we have been doing is just putting boots on the ground – and one-meal-at-a-time is how you start hoping to change the world.”

Andrés asked if the (mostly young) audience knew about one of his inspirations, Clara Barton, the US Civil War nurse who went on to found the American Red Cross. But he only earned some bemused silence. Later he didn’t even try  to explain who Robert Everett might have been (New York’s Welsh-American abolitionist) but he did cite him as another inspiration.

The chef and I spoke after the session, and Everett’s insistent advocacy came up again as Andrés wrestled – like many aid workers have to – with the familiar but disquieting trope: “Rich-World White Knight rescues Poor-World denizens in distress.” He paraphrased the 19^th Century Welsh-speaker in modern-day English, saying: “Philanthropy can seem to be about the redemption of the giver, but no – philanthropy must be about the liberation of the receiver.”

IT’S KIND-OF RARE though it can occasionally happen, that an unfinished film gets screened at a festival. Director Robert Rodriguez (of varied genres from the splatter-prone Grindhouse, his double-bill shared with Quentin Tarantino, to the family-friendly fare of his Spykids franchise) offered up his latest movie, Hypnotic, with a “work-in-progress” label.

Rodriguez is an assertively local boy made good, and told the audience at Austin’s premier venue, the venerable and wonderfully modernized Paramount Theatre, that he owed them the screening, since he was also celebrating the 30th birthday (right) of his first feature film, the neo-Western El Mariachi, famously made for just $7,000. “This theater is just a very live room,” he is fond of saying – and besides, Hypnotic was even shot entirely in Austin, and cut there too, in his own Troublemaker Studios.

Together with Richard Linklater (of Slacker, Boyhood, Before Midnight etc), Rodriguez forms a twin pillar of Austin’s fully burgeoning community of film-makers, and he revels in the local hero-worship. He gave a wry grin when he highlighted the decidedly ‘indie’ scheduling clash that was very obvious to us all, even though it was purely accidental, he said. Hypnotic’s sort-of premiere was taking place at the very same time as the Oscars® ceremony in far-away Los Angeles.

I don’t want to actually review an officially still incomplete film, but I’ll give advance notice that it is a powerful mystery tale, full of truth-warping twists and surprises. It stars Ben Affleck looking suitably drawn and haggard as a detective who’s also father to a missing young girl.

Which reminds me … the film festival’s big closing movie (this coming weekend) will feature some other Ben Affleck work. It’s his latest directing effort, Air – the story of basketball giant Michael Jordan and sporting-goods firm Nike’s development of the film’s eponymous sneaker. It surely has all the elements of a crowd-pleasing South By movie.