Hello Jana here,

SXSW (South By Southwest) is an annual multi-media festival held in Austin, Texas. It’s the perfect place for distributors to scoop up new material. This is what happened after a Saturday night, sold-out, premiere of ‘Exists‘. Lionsgate bought up the rights quickly after screening and seeing the viewers light up Twitter talking about the film.

 Eduardo Sánchez knows first-hand how effective this can be for getting  a good buzz going about a film that isn’t packed with super-stars. Sánchez is 1/2 of the brains, both director and writer, behind 1999’s ‘Blair Witch Project‘. That film holds the Guinness World Record for “Top Budget: Box Office Ratio”, costing $22,000 to produce and earned $240.5 million. The success of the film was due, in part, to the found footage nuance the filmmakers pioneered. 

Sánchez directs a script written by screenwriter Jamie Nash (‘Two Frunt Teeth‘, ‘Altered‘) ‘Exists‘ takes the found footage-style and runs with it. It follows a group of five friends as they struggle to fight off the fabled predator, Bigfoot, during a camping trip in the remote Texas woods. The film stars Chris Osborn, Dora Madison Burge and Roger Edwards. Producers on the Sasquatch film include Jane Fleming, Mark Ordesky, Robin Cowie and J. Andrew Jenkins, executive producers George Waud, D. Todd Shepherd, Gregg Hale and Reed Frerichs.