SXSWORLD

An Extraordinary Homecoming: S outh by Southwest holds a special place in the hearts of many fi lmmakers, but Lena Dunham's return in 2012 marks a truly extraordinary homecoming. Just two years ago, her quasi-auto- biographical sophomore feature, Tiny Furniture, took SXSW by storm, nabbing the festival's Best Narrative Feature prize and kick starting a whirlwind journey that later included scoring theatrical distribution with IFC Films, an Independent Spirit Award win, and a recent, rare Criterion Collection release. In April she debuts her HBO series Girls – also co-executive produced and written by Dunham, with Judd Apatow (who introduced himself after watching Tiny Furniture) serving as exec- utive producer – with a special preview at SXSW, the festival she calls "the reason that I've had a career." It all began the year before the debut of Tiny Furniture, when Dunham's feature debut, Creative Nonfi ction, caught the eye of SXSW head Janet Pierson. "It didn't have actors, it didn't have composed camera work; it was a little story about a little girl," Dunham, now 25, recalls. Encouraged by support from Pierson and the SXSW creative com- munity at large, Dunham poured her eff orts into Tiny Furniture, a fi lm about a recent college grad fl oundering sans purpose while living back home in her artist mother's NYC digs, partly in the hope of screening it at SXSW. "When I was making Tiny Furniture I never really thought about anything beyond, 'Will I get to watch it in one of the cool the- aters in Austin?' " It did screen, of course, and the resulting success allowed Dunham Lena Dunham Returns to SXSW with Girls by Jen Yamato Scene from Girls are really interesting to me, who I don't feel like I see in television or mainstream fi lms, to the forefront," says Dunham. Filming on the former Sex and the City sound stages lent an appropriate tingle to the proceedings, even as Girls aims for droll relatability where SATC off ered pure femme-driven fantasy. "It felt like this awesome synchronicity," Dunham explains. "We're fans, but we also wanted to express that these are not Sex and the City girls – they're the girls who watched Sex and the City, moved to New York and then went, 'Holy shit, this is not what I was seeing every Sunday night.' " Girls joins good company in a year that has already seen an infl ux of 20-something female-driven storytelling in fi lm and television. 32 SXSW ORLD /FEBRUAR Y 2012 to expand the reach of her "weird stories" to a larger audience. Once Tiny Furniture attracted attention outside the indie world, Dunham was tapped to adapt a script for producer Scott Rudin; in early 2011, HBO picked up Dunham's NYC-set series Girls, executive-produced by Apatow and Jenni Konner. If Tiny Furniture's adrift heroine, Aura, embodied a fresh-out-of-col- lege malaise, Dunham's Girls alter ego, 24-year-old Brooklyn transplant Hannah Horvath, is a loose echo of Aura two years removed from graduation – an aspiring writer/publishing house intern who, in the series pilot, fi nds herself cut off fi nancially by her loving but exasperated parents. Driven to seize her big dreams but not quite sure how, Hannah stumbles her way through the often mortifying wilds of young adult- hood, work, life and love with her three equally unsteady girlfriends (Allison Williams, Zosia Mamet and Jemima Kirke). "With Girls, I'm getting to bring the kind of female characters who Lena Dunham at the 2010 SXSW Film Awards Like their counterparts on network television, these ladies may not be teenage girls and are not yet career women, but they are distinctly of their generation, complete with Twitter accounts and rules for dating via text. In fi nding a home at HBO, Dunham has found a network well-attuned to and embracing of her forthright brand of storytelling. "HBO is a network that doesn't ask you to adhere to really specifi c TV rules," she says. "Th ey really respect the idea that half-hour TV can look all diff erent ways." Being able to be real about sex, too, benefi ts the stark honesty – and penchant for mortifying in fl agrante encounters – depicted in Girls. According to Dunham, "Th e goal is to say, 'What does it feel like to be a young woman in a sexual relationship right now?' It's stressful and terrifying, and to really embrace the awkwardness of that." "It would be easy to say they sound like navel-gazing, self-referential, neurotic city girls," Dunham admits, "but my hope is that the girls feel specifi c but also like girls that you know. To me, the most relatable thing in the world is the struggle to do better." "With the show, we never had any grandiose goals, like we were going to capture the spirit of the people," Dunham insists. "But I did defi nitely feel that there were trends among my friends that came from being the fi rst generation raised on IMing and texting, girls graduating college during a recession … there's a specifi c spirit, like there is with any generation, that I'd hoped the show would tap into. So we'll see if it does that for people." ■ CLIFF CHENEY JOJO WHILDEN / HBO

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