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Austin Film Festival Announces 2021 Lineup

The 28th annual festival will take place October 21–28

The Austin Film Festival is offering a preview of coming attractions that includes world premieres, directorial debuts and movies with deep connections to its namesake city.

This October, AFF will hold its 28th annual event in-person and online. Badges of both types as well as merchandise and other passes to various festival events and conferences are on sale now at austinfilmfestival.com.

Fans of local and emerging talent will find plenty of exciting content at AFF this year. University of Texas alumna Sophie Miller wrote and directed Ranch Water, which will debut at the festival and tells the story of a group of women on the verge of college graduation and the rest of their lives. Another coming-of-age film, Cusp, directed by Parker Hill and Isabel Bethencourt, focuses on a younger group of teen girls who spend a summer in the small Texas town where they are growing up.

Scenes from Cusp.

Commissioner of Power is a documentary feature also making its world premiere at AFF. The film follows the life of influential powerlifter and Olympic weightlifter Terry Todd, who co-founded the H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports at the University of Texas at Austin.

The One You’re With — by Austin native Chad Werner — is a pandemic-era romantic comedy, which follows a couple whose one-night stand turns into 60 days of quarantine due to a national emergency.

These films were announced Thursday as the second wave of programming for AFF. For a full list of movies and events, visit the festival’s site.

Following Terry Todd, Commissioner of Power will make its world premiere.

The first 10 films added to the lineup were revealed last month. Among the titles in the first wave are It Hatched, an Icelandic horror movie making its world premiere; Memoria, which stars Tilda Swinton as a woman searching for the source of sounds only she can hear; Ghosts of the Ozarks, which stars Tim Blake Nelson, David Arquette and Phil Morris in a post-Civil War story set in Arkansas; Everything I Ever Wanted to Tell My Daughter About Men, a film directed by an ensemble of 15 women about a mother recalling her past relationships to her daughter; and A24’s The Humans, whose cast includes Steven Yeun, Amy Schumer, Richard Jenkins, June Squibb, Beanie Feldstein and Jayne Houdyshell.

For the full lineup and descriptions of all the movies at AFF 2021 — with more announcements to come — click here.

The Austin Film Festival will take place October 21st through the 28th.