Madhurima
SAN FRANCISCO: South by Southwest festival, most commonly known as SXSW for the year 2020 has been cancelled due to the coronavirus outbreak which has reached the united states. The event takes place in Austin, Texas annually. It is an assortment of music festivals, conferences, interactive media and parallel films which are organised jointly. SXSW was supposed to take place from 13 March to 22 March, but it got officially cancelled on 6 March 2020 following the highly contagious virus epidemic.
The organisers of the event and government officials were compelled to take this step as more than 50,000 individuals came together by signing an online petition. Renowned tech companies like Twitter, Apple, TikTok and Facebook also withdrew their names from the event.
A news conference was organised by the city of Austin where the county officials announced a "local disaster", although they said there have been no cases in Austin so far, there have been a few cases in Texas. It was reported by an esteemed daily.
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During this week, companies like TikTok, Twitter and Facebook announced that they won't be making an appearance at the tech and culture event.
Apple was scheduled to do a world premiere of "Beastie Boys Story", Spike Jonze's documentary and the screening of its animated music series called "Central Park" and the docuseries "Home". The multimillion-dollar company also withdrew itself from the festival.
Online streaming giant, Netflix was supposed to showcase 5 films out of which, 4 were documentaries. The feature film 'Uncorked' and documentaries, like 'A Secret Love', 'LA Originals', 'Mucho Mucho Amor', 'Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics'. The company was also organising a panel for #BlackExcellence, all of which remains cancelled now.
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Amazon Studios also dropped the plan of screening "Upload" and "Tales of the Loop". A special Q&A session was also organised with the cast and crew of the projects.
The organisers of the SXSW expressed that they were "devastated" as the cancellation got announced. They mentioned, "The show must go on' is in our DNA." Even though the city and county officials were behind the cancellation of the event, co-founder Nick Barbaro revealed that the organisers had no cancellation insurance with regard to the disease outbreak.
